User:Pleun/rwrs/Essay The art of

(*website that combines later versions of the text of Walter Benjamin by multiple writers, that became works with values of their own.)

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), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 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), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 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 notes 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.” (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.” (p. 219)

The aura of a work of art can be described as “an unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be.” (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.” (p. 220)

Cybernetic Systems

Bill Nichols writes that his intention with his essay is to forward Benjamins text to his media landscape, where cybernetic systems have just emerged. He also puts Benjamins essay in the context of the time it was written (1936, in the years leading up to the second world war) and uses it as an explanation of the shift Benjamin described from the work of art based in ritual to it being based in politics. He elaborates on how this process or these shifts to new habits is not ideological but transformative for Benjamin and how this process is inevitable.

Nichols than asks these two important questions of which the answer will help us compare the application of terms like aura, uniqueness and value, authenticity and authorship to the medium of the different authors time. “in what ways our 'sense of reality' is being adjusted by new means of electronic computation and digital communication?” and:

“if contemporary transformations in the economic structure of capitalism, attended by technological change, institute a less individuated more communal form of perception similar to that which was attendant upon face-to-face the ritual and aura, but which is now mediated by anonymous circuitry and the simulation of direct encounter?”

(Nichols, B (1988) The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems)

Three ages are discussed of which he describes which counterparts let us measure the self and give us guarantees of identity in that the counterpart was similar but different. In early capitalism it was the comparison to the animal, later in monopoly capitalism it was the machine world and in post-industrial capitalism it is cybernetic systems.

“If mechanical reproduction centers on the question of reproducibility and renders authenticity and the original problematic, cybernetic simulation renders experience, and the real itself, problematic. Instead of reproducing, and altering, our relation to an original work, cybernetic communication simulates, and alters, our relation to our environment and mind.”

(Nichols, B (1988) The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems)

Cybernetic systems offers the illusion of freedom and control, but are inherently always set in a predetermined environment. Because of this illusion we can also feel a sense of value and even aura around the simulation created. A known analog example of this is the IKEA effect, where the makers feel a sense of pride and added value to the piece of furniture, after construction it themselves. “Having successfully built IKEA boxes or Lego sets, participants then valued the product of their labor more highly.”(Norton, M (2011) The “IKEA Effect”: When Labor Leads to Love, p. 20) Nichols also talks about this kind of effect as the fetishization of engaging with a process and with control of the process instead of the object. He sees this as inevitable as the object itself loses aura, it shifts to something else, like the process.

Digital Recombination

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.” Like Nichols described in his essay within his age, the focus lies on the process, not the object. The variation the process brings makes each new output an artwork in itself. And unlike in Nichols age, the variation and tools have become so big that their isn't a preset environment for the artwork to transform. Each variation has its own value, its own author and authenticity.

The Aura of the Self in the Age of Digital Exhibitionism

This essay caused a few question relating the the current state of media and aura. In the contemporary media landscape a medium is not only used to mediate between us and, or interact with, the information, but also to broadcast ourselves. This takes the 'simulation of the self', which Nichols is talking about in his essay, a step further as in that the simulation is not supposed to be 'the Other', but as much alike the self as possible. I'm questioning what happened to a persons aura, uniqueness and even value compared to previous times, before this narcissistic exhibitionism within among others social media. Your online self is a manipulated reproduction, but is it manipulated enough to convey value in itself or does it decrease value of the original. Does our online presence become a work on its own or is it still to much a version of the one work?

In a very simple comparison: a technical reproduction of a work of art increases accessibility which has a great deal of positive effects, but also the negative one that the original always decreases in value. The need for putting effort into experiencing the work of art decreases when having already experienced its reproduction. At the end of Jos de Muls essay he looks to the future and wonders if the non-human characters of the new media we invented are going to be our successors in evolution of life. Is our online presence going to have more value than our offline one? Isn't this in many instances not already the case, where we present ourselves online to find jobs and husband/wives? To what extend can we separate ourselves from our online presence?

The main question here would be, but maybe to save this for another time in another text, are we losing our own aura?

Conclusion

The aura in itself hasn't disappeared, but seems to have shifted to all of the variations of a work in existence. Value and authorship lie in manipulation and adaption of the work to own interpretation and new meaning. With the extend of uniqueness created we can speak of authenticity. Everyone can manipulate because of the increasingly widespread accessibility of tools, so everyone can become an author.

Notes

• Benjamin, W (1936), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Modern Art and Modernism, p. 217-222.
• Nichols, B (1988) The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems, PDF.
• de Mul, J (2008) The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination. In J. Raessens, M. Schäfer, M. v. d. Boomen, Lehmann and S. A.-S. & Lammes (eds.), Digital Material: Anchoring New Media in Daily Life and Technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, May 2009, 95-106.
• Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon, Dan Ariely (2011) The “IKEA Effect”: When Labor Leads to Love, Harvard Business School.