The Way We Were

Having the history of new media on my mind these days forces me to confront old texts from great thinkers introduced to me during my jejune (but ultimately fruitful) early years as an undergrad.

Every time I present Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, it is met with hostility and dismissiveness. His Marxist leanings can't be ignored for the sake of his edifying, albeit overly intolerant and slightly smug and moralistic, identification of soulless art. First, I must emphasize the importance of his attributing (certain) art with the notion of a soul -- defined only by a works of art's quality of true originality and non-reproducibility -- as being undeniably illuminating!

Walter Benjamin dared to attack the irreversible rise of technology, not because he was an aging ludite with a chip on his shoulder, though it can be argued that he knew very little about the rogue world of film and photography, except to suggest that its impact could be revolutionary and political in its very inability to resemble works of art that embodied an aura. His arguments in this essay presciently suggest that reproduction itself will take ownership over a work of art. He at once feared and celebrated the idea and metatext of it all: that a work can be stripped of its novelty in the process of reproduction. It changes the way we make, exchange, and define art. It changes the role of the artist, and blurs the clarity behind the creation of the work: its source undefined, all of its parts borrowed or hacked, manipulated beyond recognition, and recycled to infinity.

Perhaps when I first read this text -- before artist and technology became inseparable partners in creation -- these ideas were digestibly unoffensive. And even though I can't imagine a world without photography and film as works of art with recognizable auras, I also can't imagine a world without such mindful antagonists as he. Recognizing the potential and, in his mind, the setbacks of reproduction, Benjamin unknowingly set the groundwork for dialogues about virtuality, space and interactivity, and simulation, all of which rely on technologies of reproduction (data transfer, for example); however their resulting spaces of in-betweenness are the very definition of the soul-defining quality of aura he argued makes a work of art a true work of art, something that only those engaged in exclusive rituals could take part.

Rather than support his claim that art can be distinguished by its nature of non-reproduciblity, I recognize a compromise that allows for a certain porousness in his arguments. Finding the aura -- a definition that has changed since Benjamin penned it in this context -- has become a personal goal to at once cement (or, in some some cases, revive) his ideas and to prove him wrong, both good reasons to keep this text in circulation.

Plus, check out that moustache.

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