Mechanical Reproduction In The Age Of Art
Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Art
Paul Mattick Jr
Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol.10 (1993), 127-147 The enormous impact of Waller Benjamin 's famous essay on 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction ' is largely due to his claim that photography has 'transformed the entire nature of art, destroying its semblance of autonomy in relation to social and political processes, and liquidating 'the traditional value of thc cultural heritage’ (Benjamin, 1969a. 227, 226. 221). Potographs (and especially moving pictures) cannot, he believed, be invested with the 'aura ' of timelessness and sanctity which Benjamin saw as essential to the classical artwork: they give themselves not to aesthetic contemplalion by a chosen few but to absorption by the masses, who in this way acquire a mode of experience adequate to the social changes called for by technological development.
While Benjamin 's friend and critic, T.W. Adorno, questioned his assumption of the politically and culturally 'progressive ' conseqnences of the practice of pholography, a number of recent writers have questioned the very idea that photography has had these consequences. According to W.J.T. Mitchell, for instance, pholography itself has been absorbed by traditional notations of fine art. When Benjamin (in his 'Short History ' of Photography ') praises the production of aura in Nadar , and the destruction of aura in Atget, he is praising them as moments in the formation of a new, revolutionary conception of art that bypasses all the philistine twaddle about creative genius and beauty. And yet it is precisely these traditional notions of aesthetics, with all their attendant claims about craftsmanship, formal subtlety, and semantic complexity, that have sustained the case for the artistic status of photography. (Matchell. 1986:181-4)
Similarly, Christopher Phillips (1982: 28) has shown to what extent Benjamin 's predictions about the
Paul Mattick Jr
Theory, Culture & Society (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol.10 (1993), 127-147 The enormous impact of Waller Benjamin 's famous essay on 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction ' is largely due to his claim that photography has 'transformed the entire nature of art, destroying its semblance of autonomy in relation to social and political processes, and liquidating 'the traditional value of thc cultural heritage’ (Benjamin, 1969a. 227, 226. 221). Potographs (and especially moving pictures) cannot, he believed, be invested with the 'aura ' of timelessness and sanctity which Benjamin saw as essential to the classical artwork: they give themselves not to aesthetic contemplalion by a chosen few but to absorption by the masses, who in this way acquire a mode of experience adequate to the social changes called for by technological development.
While Benjamin 's friend and critic, T.W. Adorno, questioned his assumption of the politically and culturally 'progressive ' conseqnences of the practice of pholography, a number of recent writers have questioned the very idea that photography has had these consequences. According to W.J.T. Mitchell, for instance, pholography itself has been absorbed by traditional notations of fine art. When Benjamin (in his 'Short History ' of Photography ') praises the production of aura in Nadar , and the destruction of aura in Atget, he is praising them as moments in the formation of a new, revolutionary conception of art that bypasses all the philistine twaddle about creative genius and beauty. And yet it is precisely these traditional notions of aesthetics, with all their attendant claims about craftsmanship, formal subtlety, and semantic complexity, that have sustained the case for the artistic status of photography. (Matchell. 1986:181-4)
Similarly, Christopher Phillips (1982: 28) has shown to what extent Benjamin 's predictions about the
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