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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
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I
In principle a work of art has always been reproducible.
Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made
by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works,
and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. 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.
The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of
art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only
art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique
and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art
became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script
became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the
mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are
a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining
from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though
particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching
were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography
made its appearance.
With lithography the technique of reproduction
reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished
by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block
of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the
first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers
as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic
art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing.
But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by
photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction,
photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which
henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye
perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial
reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with
speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images
at the speed of an actor's speech. Just as lithography virtually implied
the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film.
The technical reproduction of sound was tackled at the end of the last
century. These convergent endeavours made predictable a situation which
Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: 'Just as water, gas, and
electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs
in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or
auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of
the hand, hardly more than a sign.' Around 1900 technical reproduction
had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted
works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact
upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic
processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than
the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations
- the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film - have had on
art in its traditional form. |