User:Pleun/rwrs/Essay The art of

The work of Art in the Age of ...

In 1936 cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay which he named 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.' With this essay he developed an insightful way of thinking about media and art, where art became media and media became art. The in his age recently developed reproducibility of film and photography had consequences for its perception, its value and its authorship.

The essay inspired a few follow up essays by multiple writers in the last eighty years, who each applied Benjamins argument to the media of their time to see if it still holds. Bill Nichols wrote the essay 'The work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems' in 1988 when the general use of the computer and other simulation media were very new. He discusses a shift from a focus on the object to the focus on interaction with the object. Jos de Mul wrote his version 'The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination' twenty years later in 2008 about interfaces and databases, describing a shift from exhibition value to manipulation value.

“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.”
–Benjamin, W (1936) Modern Art and Modernism, p. 219.

How do Nichols and de Mul apply Benjamins arguments in their essays and how could the arguments be applied to the contemporary media landscape?

Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin starts his essay with a historical overview on the reproducibility of art and the surpassing of one medium by the next, starting with the Greek empire to the 20th century. He remarks that around the 1900 the practice of reproduction had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.

“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.”
–Benjamin, W (1936) Modern Art and Modernism, p. 218.

After his overview he states that with reproducibility there is one immediate effect: the uniqueness of the work surrenders to accessibility. The uniqueness is connected to the history of the work; the time and place it was created, the psychical condition of the piece and the ownership. The whole concept of authenticity was based on the uniqueness of a work, which gave the work value. He argues a difference between manual reproduction, technical reproduction and mechanical reproduction in which with manual reproduction the work still preserved authority opposed to the technical variant.“Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction.” idem p. 218. The difference between the two according to Benjamin is due to the process and the reach of the copies of technical reproductions. The value of the work always decreases when an artwork is reproduced. Then he first introduces the term 'aura' as that which of the work fades in the age of mechanical reproduction and mourns “the loss of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.” idem, p. 219.

The aura of a work of art can be described as “an unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be.” idem, p. 219. The concept is based on the human desire to bring things closer to us. To give an example: it's the reason people want to travel to a country rather than clicking through it on Google Streetview. And even then you never really get close enough to grasp its entirety, so the aura remains. In his last paragraph, Benjamin notes the release of the work of arts dependency on ritual and the shift of art being based on ritual to being based on politics. “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” idem, p. 220.

Cybernetic Systems and Digital Recombination

Bill Nichols and Jos de Mul both wrote [...]

Bill Nichols [...]

Jos de Mul describes three ages with three different ways of valuing art. In the first two are the two ages Walter Benjamin describes in his essay. The first one is the cult value or the age of historical authenticity and the second one the exhibition value or the age of mechanical reproduction. De Mul adds the third one to give the former essay an update: the manipulation value or the age of digital recombination.

In each of these ages he describes the roll of aura. In the age of historical authenticity the works of art had an uniqueness in time and place and therefore a distinct aura. The works were in service of a (religious) ritual function; a cult value. In the second age the work of art lost its aura because of the identical copies and therefore the easy access. De Mul states that the introduction of mechanical reproduction can't be hailed as cultural progress or doomed as cultural decline: it is simply different. In the age of digital recombination de Mul argues a return of the aura which lies in the uniqueness of the different versions of the work of art. He agrees with Benjamins conclusion that the work of art is no longer based on the ritual, but based on politics and extends the argument with the notion that the political power of the work itself lies in the extend of openness for manipulation of the work of art. The work can not only be digitally recombined to be political, but it can also be reflective on the politics of manipulation.

De Mul sees digital work as databases with the characteristics: add, browse, change and destroy. As soon as the recombination and manipulation of the database “becomes a goal in itself, it becomes an autonomous work of art.”

Non-human character of the new medium we invented  Human beings might be first species that creates its own succesors in the evolutions of life and by doing so making itself redundant.  Alienation: seperation between medium and body inaccesablity  Nostalgia of Walter Benjamin to aura isn’t necessary 

The Aura of the Self in the Age of Digital Exhibitionism

What is left of aura and what is the value?

Art is participation, art is interaction, everything is art, everyone is art.

Self reproduced on social media.

Everyone is media, everyone is an interface

There seems to be a relation between the amount of effort people have to put in to perceive the work and the aura it has. The more reproduction

If the self is digitally reproduced, does that destroy or at least decrease a persons aura?

Conclusion