The work of art in the age of technological reproducibility

¶ … Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

Walter Benjamin was a critic of the arts; he made some proofs on the transformation of fine arts to modernized interpretation of art. There are five main ideas to his analysis of "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," based on Benjamin (1937):

To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the "personality" outside the studio.

The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.

The history of art has different meaning when reproduced because it will be based on the interpretation of how each individual understand the situation. The "Mona Lisa" has been reproduced several times but the original art of Mona Lisa has been kept and every time a person looks at it and scrutinized a different interpretation will come up. In our modern world of today, the authenticity were being checked because only one unique work is valid and cannot be equally reproduced.

As Benjamin (1937) quoted, "War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns." With the writings of Benjamin, war gave us way to realized that there are many forms of arts and one of this is an art can be reproduce even a hundred of times with an exact copy of each one of them to the original one. People created several machine guns to survive during the made. They made replications and such reproductions helped in enhancing and modernizing machine guns. During the medieval times, only one is responsible for its own work of art and it is hard to replicate it but through developments and technology it can be traced copied and multiplied. Through a mass reproduction of machine guns during the war, the existence of the original loose its uniqueness but then it has been enhance to its thus giving them other form of art. War gave artists different kinds of perceptions and they created these perceptions through writing their experiences and knowledge. It was the time that many art forms created and interpreted.

Art became part of the fascism in terms of political repression. Benjamin (1937) once quoted that "Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves." This was the time of political tyranny, where people were not pleased with what was happening in their environment, they have the freedom to express it. There are expressed their feelings through different work of art such as filming. Through films, they used actors and actresses to manipulate the story of the film. And thus through the facial expressions and their actions people watching it can get the whole picture of what the story was all about. One of the first to sense this transformation of the actor by the test performance was Pirandello (Benjamin 1937). It was through the film actor that critics understand the moral of the story. Through time, the film was enhanced, it was first a silent film where the artists acts and try to relay the message through his actions but now, there are sounds that help the actor easily and accurately relay the message. His feelings as well the manner of his delivery through the sounds can very well understand the message of the story.

Technology boomed and changes came in rapidly, films used camera to exactly imitate the actions of the artist as well as the work of art where it can mass reproduce them. As Benjamin (1937) quoted "Demonstrating that the artistic uses of photography are identical to its scientific uses - these two dimensions having usually been separated until now - will be one of the revolutionary functions of film." Films have taken place outside. Before the revolutionary period, films are only constrained in one place but with modernization films can be taken outside and in different places. With the help of new filming equipments it has been possible to shoot even in different conditions. With the completeness of film, all aspects and message conveyed are clear to the audience.