Perhaps Benjamin’s best-known work is ‘The Work of Art in the Age

of Mechanical Reproduction’. This short piece provides a general

history of changes in art in the modern age. Benjamin’s insight here
is that each human sensory perspective is not completely biological
or natural. It is also historical. The ways people perceive change with
social changes, or changes in ‘humanity’s entire mode of existence’.

In Marxist fashion, Benjamin sees the transformations of art as an

effect of changes in the economic structure. Art is coming to
resemble economic production, albeit at a delayed pace. The
movement from contemplation to distraction is creating big changes
in how people sense and perceive. Historically, works of art had an
‘aura’ – an appearance of magical or supernatural force arising from
their uniqueness (similar to mana). The aura includes a sensory
experience of distance between the reader and the work of art.

The aura has disappeared in the modern age because art has become
reproducible. Think of the way a work of classic literature can be
bought cheaply in paperback, or a painting bought as a poster. Think
also of newer forms of art, such as TV shows and adverts. Then
compare these to the experience of staring at an original work of art
in a gallery, or visiting a unique historic building. This is the
difference Benjamin is trying to capture.

The aura is an effect of a work of art being uniquely present in time

and space. It is connected to the idea of authenticity. A reproduced
artwork is never fully present. If there is no original, it is never fully
present anywhere. Authenticity cannot be reproduced, and
disappears when everything is reproduced. Benjamin thinks that
even the original is depreciated, because it is no longer unique. Along
with their authenticity, objects also lose their authority. The masses
contribute to the loss of aura by seeking constantly to bring things
closer. They create reproducible realities and hence destroy
uniqueness. This is apparent, for instance, in the rise of statistics.
The traditional work of art is experienced mainly through distanced
contemplation. In declining bourgeois society, this became an asocial
stance. In contrast, modern cultural forms such as photographs, TV
shows and film do not lend themselves to contemplation. They are
imperative, challenging and agitating the viewer, putting up
signposts.

Benjamin argues that distraction became an alternative to

contemplation. Distraction is fundamentally social. It replaces the
viewer’s thoughts by moving images, stopping the viewer from
thinking. Benjamin criticises the usual account whereby true art is
contemplated and the masses seek only distraction. For Benjamin,
contemplation is a kind of domination by the author: the work of art
absorbs the audience. In contrast, distraction involves the audience
absorbing the work of art. Reception of art now normally happens in
a state of distraction, especially in the case of film. ‘The public is an
examiner, but an absent-minded one’.

This echoes contemporary discussions of how media exposure

reduces attention spans and may even produce stimulus overload.
Most often, this takes the form of right-wing concerns that people
are losing the ability to pay attention or concentrate on tasks. But
radical authors, too, usually analyse it in terms of a debilitating
submersion and a loss of space and time to think.

The loss of aura seems to have both positive and negative effects for
Benjamin. He sees the aura, authenticity, and uniqueness of works of
art as fundamentally connected to their insertion in a tradition. The
reproduced work of art is completely detached from the sphere of
tradition. It loses the continuity of its presentation and appreciation.

Art was originally derived from ritual, and depended on it for its
aura. The earliest works of art might have been items such as totem
poles, cave paintings, and fertility dolls. (In One-Way Street,
Benjamin provides a list of differences between art and ‘fetishes’,
suggesting the latter are ‘documents’ of subject-matter). In the
modern age, art is ‘liberated’ from its dependence on ritual. As a
result, the experiences connected with ritual and tradition are lost.
The autonomy of art is also lost.

Tradition and ritual have mainly negative meanings for Benjamin. But
they could also be taken to connote the density of local knowledges,
of particular lifeworlds, and of the uniqueness of each person and
their personal world. In his works on flânerie and collecting,
Baudrillard is melancholy about the impending loss of these
personalised forms of ritual and tradition.

On the positive side, this loss of tradition brings the work of art into
the distinct life-situation of the reader, viewer or listener. The work
of art can be disconnected from its past uses and brought into new
combinations by the reader. Think of memes as an example of this.
Some memes take artistic images – such as the painting of Joseph
Ducreux or a passage from Lord of the Rings – and recreate them
endlessly, through different reconstructions. In his day, Benjamin
saw film as having a similar effect on culture.

According to Benjamin, art is now gaining ‘entirely new functions’.

The liberation of art from ritual frees it for connections to the
practice of politics. Responses to art are also increasingly collective –
as in audience responses to film – the individual reaction is produced
or compounded by the reaction of the entire audience. Earlier
artworks, even when exhibited in galleries, did not lead to an
‘organised’ mass response. (This difference is probably less relevant
in the era of television).

Film feels as if it frees the viewer from the confining modern

environment, by gestures such as speeding-up and close-ups. It
expands the available images immensely. Benjamin argues that film
meets the need which Dadaism tried to create by earlier, inadequate
means. Dadaism is usually taken to have aimed to ridicule and
portray as absurd the modern world, and to emphasise the role of
unpredictability in creativity. Dadaist artists rearranged everyday and
artistic objects and conventions to subvert dominant assumptions.
They are a forerunner of subvertisers such as Adbusters and
the Deterritorial Support Group. Benjamin believed that film – which,
in this period, included slapstick comedy such as the work of Charlie
Chaplin and montage-based works such as those of Eisenstein–
played a similar role.

Benjamin also writes of a triumph of the tactile or actively lived

appreciation of art over the optical or contemplative side. He makes
the distinction in relation to architecture. A tourist contemplates a
building, whereas a user appropriates it in a tactile way, living or
working within it. Benjamin seems to be suggesting that art should
be participatory and interactive, as in theatre of the oppressed.
However, he also suggests that a tactile appreciation occurs, not
consciously, but through habit. Even a distracted person can form
habits. Hence, today’s art takes the form of the education or
construction of habits. This dual process of destroying and renewing
meanings is the flip-side of the crisis and renewal of humanity. For
Benjamin, the positive aspect is inconceivable without the negative.

Reactionaries attempt to revive the old, ritual function of art. Film,

for instance, is assigned the function of expressing supernatural and
mythical phenomena. This view is central to critiques of special
effects. Benjamin thinks this attempt is ultimately untenable. The
viewer of films or photographs takes the position of the cameraman.
This is a standpoint which cannot be mystified.

Films, TV and photography are also unusually prone to spectacle.

They provide a scene which appears credible only from the exact
angle at which they are shot. From any other angle, the visibility of
props and cameras would render the image unbelievable. Only from
the exact view of the camera is it credible. The equipment-free
reality, appearing as credibly real, is paradoxically only the effect of
extensive artifice. Yet it appears more equipment-free than, for
instance, painting. This parallels the fate of immediate reality in a
technological world. Works of art themselves are also recomposed
from fragments. For instance, a traditional artist paints an entire
scene. In contrast, a filmmaker cuts up and reassembles a film. Films
also have dream-like characteristics, and allow the detailed analysis
of each frame, allowing a fragmentary reproduction of (for instance)
the act of walking.

Art has always been reproducible – for instance, early books could be
copied by hand. Mechanical reproduction, however, is new. TV and
radio provide images on tap, much as electricity and water are
supplied. They can easily be switched on and off, starting and
stopping the flow of images. In One-Way Street, Benjamin prefigures
today’s concerns about information overload. He argues that
children are now bombarded with printed letters even before they
can read. The effect is that they can no longer experience the
‘archaic stillness of the book’, instead being overwhelmed by ‘locust
swarms of print’ which ‘eclipse the sun’ of the intellect.

Benjamin also discusses the impact on actors of performing for a

machine instead of a human audience. He suggests it is an
uncomfortable experience in which the body is deprived of
substance. There is a feeling of strangeness, similar to looking in a
mirror, but with the mirror image separable and transportable. (The
idea of the mirror is central to ego-formation in psychoanalysis, and
the idea of an alienated double is widespread in fairy tales). The
experience is of the capture of one’s ‘heart and soul’, not only one’s
labour.

The aura of the actor, and of the character portrayed by the actor,
vanishes because the camera is substituted for the audience. In place
of the aura, film studios build up a cult of the star as a constructed
image. This is not a true aura, but the ‘phony spell of a commodity’.
What’s more, art is no longer semblance. It fuses with reality.
Benjamin’s example here is that filmmakers will sometimes actually
startle an actor, so as to get the startled reaction on film. There are
also echoes here with the feminist critique of pornography.
How does this affect social life when – through CCTV, reality TV,
Facebook, YouTube and home videos – most people are being turned
into film actors? Does the public undergo this same desubstantiation,
and lose its aura? Is this why people are increasingly constituted as
‘false selves’, identified with their Facebook profile, and increasingly
desensitised to issues of privacy and creativity? And what happens
when people take their models for living from soap operas, adverts,
or porn? Perhaps everyone (in the mainstream at least), to an
increasing degree, turn into commodities voluntarily, through media
exhibitionism, or involuntarily, through surveillance – while also
copying commodified ways of acting from the media. An analysis in
this direction will be taken further by Virilio and Baudrillard. In
Benjamin’s portrayal, it is as if cameras actually steal a part of our
souls, casting this part into alienation.

However, Benjamin’s view is more optimistic than this extrapolation

suggests. He also observes that, with expanding publication (and this
is even more true in the age of the Internet), nearly everyone can
publish if they want to. Hence the division between author and
public disappears. It is simply a functional division – the author is
whoever happens to be writing at a particular time. Any reader can
become a writer. Hence, modern humans have a claim, perhaps a
right, to be reproduced. Everyone can now claim to be the subject of
culture, as in more recent theories of “a right to narrate”. According
to Benjamin, the capitalist media, such as the film industry, seek to
prevent such claims. They seek to supplant ‘illusion-promoting
spectacles’ for mass participation.

This gives a different slant to phenomena such as YouTube, in which

people reclaim the ability to represent (though not necessarily to be
viewed). It also prefigures issues around intellectual property, as the
right to narrate spreads into the reworking of media products, the
creation of fanfiction and fan art, AMVs and computer game
modifications.
But how does this positive power to represent oneself contradict or
combine with the alienating force of mechanical capture? Is it
possible, when in control of the images, to turn this capture into a
means for autonomous sorcery? Or does it necessarily become
inscribed in the Spectacle, as the lack of ‘authentic’ relations to
others reproduces alienated social relations, mediated by the
machine?

This text must be read alongside its epilogue, and other pieces on
fascist aesthetics, to understand how Benjamin differentiates
progressive and reactionary/fascistic uses of modern media. Not
every use of modern technology is progressive. The text of ‘Work of
Art…’ is intended to provide a theory of art which is useless to
fascism and reactionaries, but useful to revolutionaries in the politics
of art. There are continuities between phenomena Benjamin treats
as progressive (massification, the claim to be represented,
distraction, fragmentarity, reproducibility) and all forms of mass and
new media. Yet only in certain circumstances do such phenomena
produce a politicisation of art.

Humanity becoming a spectacle or contemplated object to itself, or

subordinating itself to an aesthetic for an external gaze, is taken by
Benjamin to be alienating, reactionary and fascistic. Hence, there
seems to be a direct, political effect of technological changes, and a
distorted, fascistic effect which occurs when this direct effect is
truncated and contained. A Benjaminian reading might suggest that
this fascistic ‘distortion’ has now become the normal form of the
production and consumption of culture. The progressive force of
new media has been thoroughly contained, as this particular
appropriation has been normalised.

Perhaps this pattern of radicalisation followed by recuperation has

even happened with each emergent technology – newspapers,
novels, film, (pirate) radio, the Internet. Each time, the new medium
has a progressive force, dehabituating people from expected
relations, offering new channels for experimental activity,
mediatised subcultures, and the spread of dissenting perspectives.
Each time, corporations and states have gradually remoulded the
mainstream use of the medium to commercial and repressive
purposes, pulling back into conformity the line of flight which the
new medium initiated. Each time, the new medium became an
integral part of an entirely habituated reproduction of the present –
as tabloids, mass fiction, blockbusters, commercial radio, Web
2.0. Each time, paradoxically, the new emergence has left the
system stronger than it was before.

Benjamin also calls in this work for a ‘politicisation of art’. The

politicising of art refers to the depiction of life at its most ephemeral.
This is part of Benjamin’s broader project of the ‘redemption’ of the
everyday through a small split which makes a world of difference.
The object, detached from the fields of tradition and of conventional,
operational use, can be recombined in new ways. Life is politicised in
becoming a set of fragments which can be rearranged by an active
user. This is Benjamin’s response to the aestheticisation of politics.
Art is to be reconstructed as something to be used, recomposed,
combined rhizomatically, as a montage. This style of art is radically
counterposed to the integrity and wholeness of the artistic spectacle.

Benjamin might be wrong that originals have disappeared entirely.

(Original artworks, historic buildings, first editions of books, even film
stills and props retain immense power). But the culture people
experience in everyday life is generally of a mass-produced type.
Some is even simulated, with no original to refer to. In earlier times,
even everyday objects, such as clothes and cutlery, would often be
hand-made and unique.

Ritual is not necessarily reactionary. The communion of ritual

practices may be necessary for the formation of non-massified social
groups, as in Peterson’s account of activism as neo-sect. An example
would be the use of puppets in protests. On the other hand, the
‘liberation’ of art from ritual may not free it for progressive politics. It
may, instead, become a property of the society of the spectacle.
The change Benjamin saw was the growing propaganda or
mobilisation potential of images. He saw this as positive because it
lent itself to progressive propaganda, to revolutionary newspapers,
pamphlets, placards and flyposters. Yet this propagandist function
may be even more available to construct myths, especially when the
means of cultural production are monopolised by the powerful.
What’s more, the overwhelming pressure of constant imperatives
from all-pervasive signs may create a world of generalised anxiety,
and a death of private reflection.

The loss of distance between meaning and its deployment in

immediate propaganda may produce a flattened world in which
revolutionary possibilities become invisible. If the audience absorbs
the work of art, but the audience is itself trapped in mythologies and
alienated subjectivity, then the revolutionary power of art is
truncated. The absorption of art becomes tautological, and the lines
of flight available are correspondingly reduced. Authors sympathetic
to Benjamin’s analysis might see in this a reproduction of ritual
aspects of art.
In his essay, "The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical
Reproduction", Walter Benjamin talks about a move in
perception and its effects in the wake of the advent of film
and photography in the twentieth century. He additionally
mentions Marx on the capitalist method of creation amid the
technological revolution; that talks about what could be
normal in the future of the industrialist generation, that is —
the profiteering of the lower-class and the disintegration of
capitalist enterprise. The impact of the innovative
propagation of art by craftsmanship tends to play a critical
part in the social and political estimations of the society and
fascists. Where government officials utilized the art as a
method for developing their political plan on the people of
society and controlled the exhibition as to pass on just the
messages and strategies helpful to their aspirations. Society
saw art as a one of a kind instrument of traditional qualities.
The replication of art can contribute in controlling the reliable
material in the support of the fascists yet then again, it can be
helpful in the upheaval of revolution of politics of art.

He talks about the sense changes inside humanity's whole

method of existence; the way we look and see the visual work
of art, it is diverse now and its results stay to be resolved.

Benjamin here endeavors to stamp something particular

about the cutting edge age or the modern age; of the
impacts of modernity on art specifically. Film and
photography point to this development. Benjamin composes
of the loss of the aura through the mechanical reproduction
of art itself. The quality for Benjamin speaks to the creativity
and authenticity of a work of art that has not been replicated.
A painting has an aura while a photo does not; the photo is a
picture of a picture while the painting remains absolutely
unique. When a painting is drawn, it can have a
historical/emotional or cultural connection between the artist
and the subject and what the artist feels about it around then.
Be that as it may, then again, the photograph of the subject
can be balanced and welded for an alternate audience at
various circumstances portraying different implications, losing
its unique 'aura'.

The sense of the 'aura' is lost on film and the reproducible

picture itself shows a move that we need to assess regardless
of whether we see it or not. This shift is historical. What does
it mean when the quality/aura is lost? Benjamin reciprocates
the loss of the aura as a loss of its meaning and
historicity/pastiche (as mentioned by Fredric Jameson in his
"Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism").
How does the mechanically reproduced work of art figure out
how to compensate for this void?

As Benjamin proceeds with, a pressure between new methods

of perception and the aura emerge. The cameraman,
intercedes with what we see, in a way which a painting can
never do. It coordinates the eye towards a particular place
and a particular story; in the meantime, it is radical and
progressive, it is likewise totalitarian. It guides us to a specific
side of a story and forgets the other parts. It dulls our
observation towards the work of art and presents diversion as
a method of reception. The area of anything we may call the
aura must be moved into a mythological space; into the
religion of virtuoso. This relates back to the cultish
characteristic of the aura itself; in its absence, there is a
grabbling for a substitution. The magical faction of the
original is broken with the loss of the aura, and now everyone
can go to an exhibition, a gallery, the theatre or the silver
screen. A radical new valuation for art is presented while in
the meantime, a radical new method of duplicity and
diversion additionally enters.

For Benjamin, the quality is dead and it exists in an unlikely

and mysterious space. The object consumes man at the same
time man consumes it. Mass utilization delights in this
outcome of the loss of the aura. For Benjamin, a separation
from the aura is a good thing. The loss of the aura can
possibly open up the politicization of art, regardless of
whether that opening is adverse or helpful is yet to be
determined. In any case, it takes into account to bring
political inquiries up with respect to the reproducible image
which can be utilized somehow.

However, Benjamin makes it clear that in this new period of

mechanical reproduction, the contemplation of a screen and
the idea of the film itself has changed such that the individual
never again contemplates the film per say; the film
contemplates them. Inside the reproducibility of images,
there is an increase of submission towards the film itself. All
by itself, this denotes a side effect and not a reason for
something terrible that is going on.

The impact of control and mass production on a unique work

of art or on its 'aura' is the real discourse point for Benjamin
in his essay. His predictions of this effect state two points —
Firstly, the art will lose its uniqueness and value under the
influence of mass production. Also, how this large-scale
manufacturing of art can influence and drive the society out
of the nerve of capitalism.