WALTER BENJAMIN SYNOPSIS

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'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction' Synopsis
Walter Benjamin

1 Replicas were first made as practice of craft or diffusing of works, or pursuit of gain. History tells us that the Greeks began with production with only tow technical procedures, namely founding and stamping. When the woodcutter came into play, graphic art became mechanically reproducible. During the middle ages engraving and etching came along with the woodcutters capabilities. At the beginning of the 19th Century lithography made its debut. It distinguished itself because it worked with tracing rather than incisions; this made it possible to keep up with printing. With photography, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated to a new level. Being able to reproduce all transmitted work of art causes a profound impact on the public. It became its own artistic process.

2 Reproduction can never reproduce the presence in time and space of the artwork that it reproduces. Its existence in the place it is and became. The traces an artwork endures over the years can only be revealed by the chemical and physical analyses. Traced from the situation to the original. The original preserves its own originality by confronting its own manual reproduction. Process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. Technical reproduction can put a copy of the original into situations, which would be out of reach for the original itself. The authenticity of the thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. The aura of the work is that which withers in age. It’s the domain of tradition. Permitting reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.

3 The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century was the beginning of the Romain art industry and the Vienna genesis. Here there was resistance against the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception. They did not attempt to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception It is easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. Experiencing the aura in different ways has a certain value to it. There is a desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly. Overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. To destroy the aura of an object is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.

4 The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition. Context can create different uniqueness, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. Born in the face of ritual, be it either magical or religious. What is important is that the aura of the work is not entirely separated from the ritual base. Art has – because of the first revolutionizing art form photography – long foreseen the current crisis, which has become evident a century later. Back then; art reacted with a theology of art. Pure art denied any social function of art but also any form of categorizing by subject matter. Now, for the first time, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its former dependence on the ritual base. The work of art becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. The total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on the ritual, it is based on politics.

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