NCT Blogg 6

How do the ideas from Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" apply to contemporary digital media?

Mass reproduction enables all people, not only the elite to appreciate art while not in the immediacy of the art and perhaps without the aura as it was appreciated prior to "Mechanical Reproduction".

There was a time when "Art" was made by artists who were skilled professionals. Now that anyone with a computer can create things digitally (music, images, videos, etc), what does that mean for "art"?

Digital media can influence peoples perception more readily and in a much faster time period.

Art is defined in a broader sense today and skilled professionals have a larger medium to choose from. Digital technology has broadened the boundaries of "Art".

Is a photoshopped image "authentic"? Do digital "things" have an "aura" (in Benjamin's terms)?

A photoshoped image in not "authentic". Digital "things" have no "aura" in Benjamin's terms because there is no presence of the original subject or original existence of the production.

"From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence."