Walter Benjamin’s interest in art and its evolution in the fast-changing society he was living in during the events of pre-WWII escalation made him thoroughly contemplate the state of art and its ability to cope and adapt to the ever-evolving notion of mass production. Benjamin asks the quintessential question, how does mass reproduction affect art?. In order to answer that question, Benjamin uses the term “Aura” to describe the physical and situational state of an art piece in a certain space and time. Aura is something that guarantees Authenticity and grants the art piece its entire value. Aura is an ensemble of historical and situational background workings that give the art piece its “one-timeness”. Benjamin argues the mass reproduction of art diminishes and drains it from its aura from the art itself, it’s not the same piece of art anymore, it’s evolved. If we are to apply this reasoning to our current state of the art it would be easier for us to understand what Benjamin meant by his notion of Aura and Authenticity. How long has it been since we last witnessed a single piece of art that holds a monumental level of “One-Timeness” and Panache which gave it what we could call “Iconicness”?.

The notion of Aura has certainly changed since the time Benjamin wrote this famous essay, but the interpretation of art has stayed the same. While benjamin thinks aura diminished the more art gets reproduced, he does make an effort to highlight what replaces it. He states that while aura was dependant on the place and time the art was created in, reproduction makes it easier for the art to be appreciated by a larger number of people and it gives. Reproducible art is made with its potential for exhibition in mind. Art may lose its aura but it gains a specific political imprint that works as the art’s synthetic aura. Platforms such as Instagram nowadays certainly exhibit such features as its main reason of existence is not to be appreciated by to be distributed to the maximum amount of people.

One key aspect that changed in art between its unique limited production and its current communal massively reproduced state is the sense of individuality it had and the feeling of “cultishness” and community engagement it has now. The question that poses itself here is, is this change good or bad ?. In my opinion, the answer to this question is subjective. Because the discussion of what made art good or bad is a synchronic discussion. What made art good in the middle ages is not what makes art good in our time, the difference in criteria and requirements for evaluation is different from time to time and this difference is determined by political, social, and economic changes that happen in that specific period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkWHrWw5yTg

When it comes to analyzing Walter Benjamin’s essay about how mechanical reproduction changed art in mid-1930s society, there are some elements he mentioned in his essay that are still applied to the modern world today. One way the role of art is still applied to modern society is that there are artists who create an original piece of art, to share it widely and earn money from it from third parties, as he mentioned in the second part of the essay. Additionally, in Part VI of Benjamin’s essay, he distinguishes the two polarities of art history, being cult value and exhibition value. These two values are still applied in modern society because cult value helps keep a piece of artwork out of sight. A church, for example, could have a religious statue stored exclusively for the priest. Meanwhile, an artwork’s exhibition value would have people visiting it in person rather than seeing it through an online image. An old photograph of an old family member also contains a cult value when it comes to remembering that family member who had passed away or was long missed. Therefore, aura or uniqueness is found as well since it helps reminisce, giving that “melancholy and incomparable beauty” as stated by Benjamin. Furthermore, Benjamin goes on to show in Part XVI of his essay how the art of film is significant in breaking that “prison-world” of what he refers to as reality. Entertainment, like movies, video games, and books are a great way to escape reality. These examples show how Benjamin’s analysis on the role of art in the mid-1930s, is still applied today.

Mr. Benjamin is the man who talks about the wonder of technology and how different it is from our time. Like the kite thing from the olden times when technology was still being invented, as we all know that the kite was made to check the weather which soon gave the idea for knowing the weather machine and to predict the weather. Benjamin’s work basically gave a new meaning to what the future can be working on and what people can be doing to help others. I agree that the fact is that benjamin has been doing a lot of great things but the thing is was that before technology wasn’t that much advance so they try to make their own thing by scratch and/or doing manual labor because there was that much tech from before. I think the fact that benjamin was using a kite to check the weather is a perfect example of what’s going in the sky or what’s going on tomorrow because like I said we used to do manual labor before we had a lot of technology. So benjamin did a good thing for everyone even though it took a while for people to work with technology.

When technology started to expand throughout the time we started to get  to the fact that technology is started to improve our daily lives. A weather machine was the first thing that was made for everyone next was cell phones, computers, tv’s, cars and so much more, this technology helps us by making sure that we are all prepared and to make sure that do what we are supposed to do to improve the world. So as people made their own things for their purpose and for their own fantasy or for anything else like something creative for people to see and/or hear like on any social media platform and it can be a great experience for people for the future. People might just think that technology is ridiculous and that it can be infecting our brains but I’ve been thinking without it I wouldn’t be able to create essays and or do so much more with my work as a producer, so I say let’s keep on creating some new technology. Benjamin may have shown how different it was on how technology was from before and how it is from now but you can tell that he meant in a surprise kind of way because of course, we are always surprised about the fact that we are making our life’s so much better. We should all be glad that we can have these new technologies because we can use them in so many things that will improve our lives and make the thing’s that we want to create for the world to see.

When I saw what benjamin said about technology from before and what it is like now I started to think about something else and it was music what it was like before. As we all know is that music is something we all love, we listen, we feel emotions, we feel inspired by the people who made them, but we wonder what it was like before the technology we use to create music. Benjamin words made me think and realize something, the way we think of technology now is like how we think of music we hear now, the moment we play the instruments we think on what we can use to record that sound so that the whole world can hear the music. That was when the time recording music began and it was a great idea for all musicians, bands, producers, all the people who love creating music, that was why Benjamin made me realize that his words were like a comparison to music. I think that it is great for people to realize how those who made their first technology over the years can make people realize it’s a similarity to what we have now and to what we always talk about over the years like how people from back in the days make music and just like what Benjamin said in his words about the technology to be used in those times years ago. I am glad that I can have the experience of knowing about what music was like and what reference they have to other people’s history.

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction by Walter Benjamin is mainly concerned with the authenticity and originality of a work of art. In our time, as technology gets more improved and advanced more works of art are being created and spread around the world. it is true that the advancements of technology makes it easy for everyone to access pieces of art everywhere in whole world. For instance, nowadays everyone can watch a movie in their smartphones. in comparison with the past, when a movie was released, the only place where to watch it was in the cinema theaters. People used to wait anxiously for the time to come and take their families to cinema and enjoy watching it. Nowadays, only few people who go to cinemas because the majority can watch any movie in their TV screens or simply in their phones.

Because of the advancements of technology, the value and authenticity of piece of art have been reduced. Let´s take the Mona Lisa painting that was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1503. When it was created, it was a masterpiece and people who value the work of art had to go to the exhibit and witness the beauty of that painting. It had a huge value and influence on people of that time. However, nowadays because of the advancements of technology, there are thousands of copies of this painting, we can almost find it in every home. This has resulted in the lose of its value and authenticity.more authentic and more valuable.

He was the first to forecast the future of art authenticity at the dawn of machine reproduction. He stated that once a work of art loses its uniqueness, its aura vanishes. As a result, the value of creative works and artists will fall until it hits nothing. This outstanding thinker is the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. He discussed this phenomenon in his insightful article The Work of Art in the Mechanical Reproduction which still can find its place in today’s world in various aspects.

In contemporary times, technology has extensively intruded into our daily lives. It’s difficult to envision a world without mechanical machinery that we utilize on a daily basis, whether at home, at work, or even on the street. For example, generation gap disputes in music taste, fashion, and creative assessments effectively show this issue. The existence of numerous singers has raised an important concern of how to distinguish artists from pries. It seems that what Walker has previously argued is projected in even today’s artistic conflicts. Furthermore, social networking has made a significant contribution to the subject under consideration. The plethora of photographs, sports apps, aesthetic photos, and so on has entirely transformed their satisfying worth and minimized the onset distinctiveness they formerly possessed. According to Walker, this came as a result of the imagery of political actors that altered the value of art to its economical price. The use of social media, for instance, has become a great political medium to keep people believing in illusions and ignoring real conflicts by engaging them in trivial topics. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’s ideas can be easily detected in modern times.

All in all, Benjamin Walker’s interesting interpretation of the link between art, politics, and mechanical reproduction remains one of the smartest intellectual analyses. His work should be one of the key topics debated by today’s generation, whether young or old, in order to uncover the true meanings behind art and political agendas. Art is indeed a subject that should be often discussed and dealt with in terms of its authenticity and functionality.

 

   The most important concept  that, if we take away anything from Benjamin’s essay, we should grasp is the concept of aura. There are two reasons for the significance of this concept: first, because it is crucial to understand how the works of art lose their aesthetic value. Second, because we can still sense this articulation of the aura in relation to our media environment today. The aura for Benjamin is simply the quality integral to an artwork that cannot be  communicated through mechanical reproduction techniques – such as photography. Think, for instance, of the Original Mona Liza in the Louvre and a photography of it in your study. The aura in this case is that stuff that the original Mona Liza has that its photographic reproduction hung on the wall of your study, no matter how precise in its replication, doesn’t have. 

  At the present time, with the rise of social media platforms, the concept of the aura still has to do with the works of art in one way or another. For Instance, in our relation to famous works of art or famous painting, the aura becomes or takes the form of ‘ popular wisdom‘. People would say: ‘when you go to the Louvre or Van Gogh museum, try to look and experience the paintings instead of just taking a picture of it.’This is exactly what Benjamin tries to convey in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he writes: “to follow with the eye – while resting on a summer afternoon – a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of branch(p:23). To take this to popular contemporary discourse, we can say that watching a concert  with a cellphone in your hand, trying to record and share the moment on social media is less aura than living it with all your senses. At this point, we might be identifying with what Benjamin is saying about aura and agreeing that, indeed, even nowadays we are losing the aura of art.

 

 

 

Benjamin dissertation is credited with developing an insightful interpretation of the role technological reproduction plays in shaping aesthetic experience; more specifically, Benjamin catalogues the significant effects of film and photography on the decline of autonomous aesthetic experience as he acknowledges the reality of artistic reproduction throughout history, although he suggests that mechanical reproduction introduced an entirely new and revolutionary change in the experience of the artwork. With mechanical reproduction, which appears in its most radical forms in film and photography, millions of images of an original are circulated, all of which lack the “authentic” aura of their source.

I agree with Benjamin’s idea of how mechanical reproduction can change the role of art in society. In today’s time, I see the same trends that he saw. There are movies which celebrate nationalism and villainize a nation’s enemy. A good example of this is some Bollywood movies about the border conflict with Pakistan. There are movies made based on real life events like Indo-Pakistani War. The movie depicts Indian soldiers fighting and sacrificing their life for their motherland. There are love stories between Hindu and Muslim, where the Hindu man goes through many hardships to get to his lover in Pakistan. Movies like these have intensely powerful dialogues and are highly emotional. After these movies, there are times where the tension between Hindu and Muslim became worse and caused riots. Though making movies is a creative process and there is so much to learn from it, the impact it makes on the viewers is also something to consider. Movies that tell one side of the story have a political message. In this sense, art does play a crucial role in shaping our society. Movies are still utilized in this way, like Walter Benjamin described in his time.

   A Poster for the 1997 Bollywood movie “Border”