Notes: Walter BJ

Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

a most sensitive nucleus - namely, its authenticity - is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a 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.

And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art"

Changes in perception vs ability to experience the aura or original

III During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes w.ith humanity's entire mode of existence.

And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contempordry life.

This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.