The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction By Walter Benjamin

In Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he argues that in the result of art no longer being created for traditional and ritualistic value, that now, in the age of mechanical reproduction, art will be based on politics. Benjamin goes on to say that the art that was once created in the past served a different purpose and as the reader, it is important to understand the context then and understand the modern techniques of art. Throughout the essay, Benjamin mentions that the aura of art has been lost through the mechanical reproduction and that aura is longer alive and is only a part of some unrealistic space. Therefore, Benjamin uses film and photography to explain their modern context and explain

This leads to a concept that Benjamin introduces called “aura” and in order to understand aura it is also important to know about the concept of authenticity. Benjamin describes authenticity as, “a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (Benjamin). When describing the aura of a work of art, two words that describe the aura are uniqueness and tradition, which are

For example, a stage actor is able to feed off of the audience’s reactions during the live performance, compared to a film actor that doesn’t have that advantage and must imagine the storyline in their head and act it out how they believe they should. Also, films are created by putting fragments of clips together. Once, the recordings and filming has been done from various locations, time, etc., it can uses technology to combine all of the good shots that the editors believe in order to create a final product. On the other hand, a live performance means that there is only one chance to get everything done and sometimes it doesn’t work out as well as people