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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
XII
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction
of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting
changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive
reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and
emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is
of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance
of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment
by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly
new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical
and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason
for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience
response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced
than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control
each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting
has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few.
The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as
developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis
of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography
but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works
to the masses.
Painting simply is in no position to present
an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for
architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie
today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions
about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat
as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against
its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries
of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth
century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously,
but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about
is an expression of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated
by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began
to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for
the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus
the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque
film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism. |