Benjamin’s article is about the reproduction of art. He discusses the history of the lithograph and the printing press, but in today’s society, reproduction is at a whole new level.
Benjamin also discusses what reproduction does to art. He says that no reproduced piece retains the original’s authenticity. He goes on to say that this depreciates its value, so basically we trade quality for quantity these days.
I completely agree with what Benjamin is saying. When I think of an example of this I think of The Great Wave off Kanagaw by Katsushika Hokusai. This is a cool piece of art, but if I saw the original in a museum it would not be that big of a deal because I can see it on Google images or at the poster sale on campus. It’s nice that I can have my own copy if I want, but I feel bad that it takes away from the value of the original.
Benjamin talks about the “aura” of art, which I interpret to mean its soul or its “specialness.” In the example of The Great Wave, I like the way it looks on my desktop, but there is nothing very special about it. It doesn’t have aura anymore. Part of having aura is in the ritual of creating the art. When I think of Hokusai creating his print, it gives the piece more value because he really worked hard to make it. The version on my desktop was probably uploaded by some art undergrad. This is clearly not as respectable as the process Hokusai went through.
This is the way art is today. There is tons of it, but none of it is as special and unique as it used to be. More recently, art has been created specifically to be reproduced, but I wonder if Da Vinci might be a little upset if he saw the Mona Lisa on allposters.com. I value originality and authenticity and wish it were a little harder to obtain a reproduced photograph, movie, painting, etc. I hope that in the future all forms of art do not become invaluable because of reproduction.
*Picture courtesy of allposters.com (http://img2.allposters.com/images/adc/10034684B.jpg)
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