E147mc: Media Culture

Professor Warner

Jan 2004

Benjamin's essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), is enormously influential for the way it put one issue on the critical agenda: in the modern period art made by machine (like photography and film) began to challenge the authority and influence of art made by the human body (painting, sculpture, theater). How, Benjamin asks, are we to interpret this fundamental shift in the location and nature of art? Is it a change to be mourned because, for example, the decay of the "aura" it brings? Or is this change to be accepted as part of the shocking intensity of modern urban life? Benjamin makes his argument by developing the following set of oppositions. As you read the essay, consider this question:

What is Benjamin's critical stance toward the modern shift from the left to the right side of this chart?

Art with Aura Art as Mechanical Reproduction

unique existence / plurality of copies

history / no history

authenticity / one note more authentic than another

tradition / novel site of reproduction

experience / loss of memory

distance / proximity

individual / masses

cult value / exhibition value

ritual / politics

actor’s performance / actor subjected to camera, stripped of his aura

audience linked to actor / audience as critic

beautiful semblance / assemblage of shots

unique aura of the person / phony “spell of personality” of the celebrity

content of beauty / art for art’s sake

painting / photograph

theater / film

contemplation or concentration / distraction

painter as magician / film-maker as surgeon

critic as attentive / spectator public as absent minded critic