Outline of Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reproduction of Artworks in the Lippmannian-Frankfurtian Debates During Advanced Technology Era
Historia i Polityka, 2021
The development of technology leads to mechanical reproduction of artworks. This tendency brings the paradox whether mechanical reproduction of artworks enlightens or blinds society. Optimistic perspective of Walter Benjamin and Lippmannian school on reproducibility faces pessimistic view of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to compare W. Lippmann, W. Benjamin, T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer’s views and summarize by checking suitability of two schools’ perspectives in advanced technological century.
*Abstract: Around the year 1900, the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film have had on art in its traditional form. In this piece, Benjamin discusses the profound impact of photography and film on our cultural conceptions of art. He argues that photography inherently lacks essential characteristic more stylish forms to create a visual representation: the aura, and hence that its main use ships from ritual to political. He discusses a shift in perception and its affects in the wake of the advent of film and photography in the twentieth century. He writes of the sense changes within humanity's entire mode of existence; the way we look and see the visual work of art is different now and its consequences remain to be determined. Benjamin devices the concept of the « aura » to explain what he sees as the near universal significance of uniqueness and permanence regarding what we consider as art.
Tatjana Bartsch, Marcus Becker, Horst Bredekamp, Charlotte Schreiter (Eds.): Das Originale der Kopie. Kopien als Produkte und Medien der Transformation von Antike, Transformationen der Antike Vol. 17 (Berlin 2010), pp. 27-42.
AJES Afeka College , Journal of Engineering & Science , 2022
In 2021, an NFT of a digital artwork by the artist @beeple was sold for 69 million dollars. This sale is the starting point for a logical-historical journey tracing the fate of the original in the digital age. We follow the footsteps of two seminal works exploring the concept of the original, the celebrated The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin and Nelson Goodman’s book Languages of Art. We examine two case studies: the Lost Leonardo – a painting that surfaced recently and claimed to be painted by Leonardo da Vinci, yet remains highly disputed, and the grandiose saga of Van Meegeren, the famous counterfeiter of Vermeer’s works from the 1930s and 1940s. Both tales are read as fascinating detective stories. We provide an analysis of our own that anchors the idea of the Original with the logic of Singular Rule – thereby giving structure to the “one of its kind” property that we associate with the original. Our final remarks discuss the relevance of our analysis to the digital art of today.