OUGD601 / COP3 / Reading / Walter Benjamin - 'The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction'

'We must be prepared for such profound changes to alter the entire technological aspect of the arts, influencing invention itself as a result, and eventually, it may be, contriving to alter the very concept of art in the most magical fashion.' - Paul Valéry, Piéces sur l'art.

'In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again.'

'It was wood engraving that made graphic art technologically reproducible for the first time.'

'With photography, in the process of pictorial reproduction the hand was for the first time relieved of the principal artistic responsibilities.'

'Even with the most perfect reproduction, one thing stands out: the here and now of the work of art - its unique existence in the place where it is at the moment.'

'While in relation to manual reproduction, the genuine artical keeps its full authority, in relation to reproduction by technological means that is not the case.' p6

'a technological reproduction is more autonomous, relative to the original, than one made by hand.'

'[technological reproduction] place[s] the copy of the original in situations beyond the reach of the original itself.'

'The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears.'

'what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced by mechanical means is its aura.'

'the 'one-of-a-kind' value of the 'genuine' work of art has its underpinnings in the ritual in which it had its original, initial utility value.'

'The reproduced work of art is to an ever-increasing extent the reproduction of a work of art designed for reproducibility.'

Cultic Value / Display Value

'In primeval times, because of the absolute weight placed on its cultic value, the work of art became primarily an instrument of magic that only subsequently... acknowledged to be a work of art.'

'Today... because of the absolute weight placed on its display value, the work of art is becoming an image with entirely new functions.'

'It is no accident... that the portrait forms the centrepiece of early photography.'

Camera as Middleman

'...the screen actor, by not presenting his performance to the audience in person, is deprived of the possibility open to the stage actor of adapting  the performance to the audience as the show goes on.'

'The audience empathises with the performer only by empathising with the camera.'

'The aura surrounding Macbeth onstage cannot, for the live audience, be detached from the aura that surrounds the actor playing him.'

'But what is peculiar about filming in the studio is that... the audience is replaced by a piece of equipment.'

'The aura surrounding the player must thus be lost - and with it... the aura around the character played.'


'An actor working in theatre enters into a part. Very often, a screen actor is not allowed to.'

'[the screen actor's] performance is not a single entity; it consists of many individual performances.'

'How Does the Cameraman relate to the Painter?' p.25

'The images both come up with are enormously different.'

'The painters' is an entity, the cameraman's chopped up into a large number of pieces.'

'The fact is, painting is not able to form the object of simultaneous reception by large umbers of people, as architecture has always been, as the epic once was, and as film is today.'

On film techniques

'...enlargement is not really concerned with simply clarifying what we glimpse 'anyway' but rather brings out wholly new structural formations in matter'.

'...the slow motion technique [doesn't] simply bring out familiar movement motifs but reveals in them others that are quite unfamiliar and that 'bear no resemblance to decelerations of rapid movements but are like strangely gliding, floating, supernatural ones'.

On Dada

'Dadaism was trying to generate the effects that people now look for in film, but using the tools of painting.'

'What they achieve [by glueing buttons and bus tickets onto artworks] is the ruthless destruction of the aura of their output.'

'Compare if you will, the screen on which the film unrolls to the canvas that carries the painting. The latter invites the viewer to contemplate... Watching a film, he cannot do this. Scarcely has he set eyes on it before it is already different.'

'I can no longer think what I wish to think. The moving images have ousted my thoughts.' Duhamel