Although it is not obvious due to the way his discussion on the traditional art work’s loss of ‘aura’ is represented, I find Benjamin’s essay to be very positive towards the new mechanically reproduced art forms. The fact that their emergence everywhere – i.e. the new focus on exhibition – has changed the way art is perceived, is of outmost importance to him. When read in connection with the introduction and epilogue, it becomes evident that Benjamin actually regards the ‘loss of aura’ and the ‘absorbtion of art by the masses’ to be what protects art from being used as an aesthetizied tool to promote party politics – like Fascism. I also liked the way he perceived the avant garde art of Dadaism as a forerunner to film and the new mode of perception the film developed. Stating that “[o]ne of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later”, Benjamin points out how Dadaism attempted to create in their pictorial and literary art the same effects the film today provides (17). Dadaist artworks were ‘reproductions’ deliberately useless for contemplation. Emerging at a time marked by the decline of the bourgeois, this art trend promoted distraction as an alternative to what it regarded the asocial bourgeois aesthetics of contemplation (Benjamin, 18). Its foremost objective was to shock and outrage the public. Benjamin regards the Dadaist art work as “an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality” (18). In this manner Dadaism initiated the demand for the distracted mode of participation now realized in film. The development from contemplative to tactile reception spurred by this avant-garde represents to Benjamin but one among many examples of how perception changes according to changes in humanity’s entire mode of existence (5). Radically overturning the more negative notion that the products of the culture industry represent a diminution of art (strongly argued by Adorno and Horkheimer, for instance), he also suggests that new mechanically reproduced forms like film may enrich more traditional art forms with important (primarily technical) insights (Benjamin, 29).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although it is not obvious due to the way his discussion on the traditional art work’s loss of ‘aura’ is represented, I find Benjamin’s essay to be very positive towards the new mechanically reproduced art forms. The fact that their emergence everywhere – i.e. the new focus on exhibition – has changed the way art … Continue reading How Benjamin liked film and stuff<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}