Walter Benjamin Art and Mechanical Reproduction

Of course I had to read it before starting my print programme. It is always funny to read a text which remains referenced so much. Hearing about this text through my tutors at RCA and seeing it mentioned in my independent research, I thought the text would be more about the value of a piece of art when it is reproduced -- not to say the essay doesn't address this question; Benjamin defines authenticity: "the weight [an object] derives from tradition" (22) and notes how it "eludes" technological reproduction (21), linking authenticity to aura. Replication, he argues, "extracts sameness even from what is unique", causing "aura" to decay due to the masses' "increasing emergence" and "desire...to "get closer" to thing" (23). His discussion of aura seems linked to the relationship he diagnoses as foundational between art and ritual: art history is for him a dialectic between "cult value" and "exhibition value" of artwork (25). He says the only vestige of cult value is in portrait photography, symbolic of what he terms a "cult of remembrance (27). Now, rather than being ritual, art, he argues, is political.

I have never heard this point on political art addressed within my lectures, and I suppose that's why I never sat down to read this full article before -- obviously, it seemed to me, the reproduction of an artwork decreases its authenticity and patently art is now made with an eye toward its reproduction (virtual even more than physical) rather than some more ritual aspect--this didn't seem so revolutionary to me, I guess. But the point of the article was lost in translation: Benjamin's discussion of aura and film and ritual and reproduction is in some ways a manifesto for communist art. Fascism, he argues, applies art to politics, whereas Communism ought rightly to apply politics to art. Fascism makes a spectacle out of politics, in short. I am not sure if I understand the nuances of this argument, as it seems like a rather circular thing: if you create political art, doesn't that mean you are both politicizing art and aestheticizing politics?

However, I suppose his thesis on Fascism distinctly relates to Nazism and Italian Fascism of his time, and there is a difference between creating spectacle in the public sphere -- creating spectacle out of politics -- and creating art which makes a political point. However, I also think that the aesthetic projects of the Fascists and Communists is differentiated based on scope -- the Fascist aesthetic-political project is more forward looking whereas the Communist seems more revisionary -- it's not as much about creating art as reading politics into art... Or perhaps I'm only educated on John Berger... I think there is a form of spectacle he's advocating in the Communist project as well within his discussion of film, and the way he talks about the masses participating in it -- spectacle is not limited to the Fascists... However, I guess I will have to give more consideration to the distinction between these forms of spectacle.

I wonder what this means in our time, where politics is every sort of spectacle, where reproduction is so ubiquitous there's barely a distinction between reproduction and reality, where "all art is political", where we devour everything with such a passivity.