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My interest in Walter Benjamin9s The Work of Art in the Age (Epoch) of its
Technical Reproducibility (1935-36)* is pragmatic. I find its structure and
content to be a mechanism, which supplies a model for focusing on and
rethinking such subjects as art history, the role of the artist as author/
producer, the nature of cultural production9s varied practices, as well as
the relationship between aesthetics and cultural politics. This text offers
me the means by which to structure these elements into a network in which it
is possible to account for the respective impact of each component on the
identity and the economies of the other9s. This platform offers me a
critical perspective from which the provisional art historical narrative
that claims to reflect Benjamin9s Art Work essay can be analyzed. Such
sociological accounts though formalist in nature takes as their central
argument the prospect that the stylistic changes that have effected art
since the mid-19thcentury can be attributed in large part to artists9
responding to the growing influence of mechanical reproduction and mass
media. Beginning with the premise that the work of art attained its
autonomy with art for art sake at that time, it then goes on to re-affirm
the view that mechanical reproduction not only threatens this illusionary
autonomy, but actually by negating its aura (the mechanisms of its secular
autonomy constituted by the 3residual affect of its historical origins as a
cult object and fetish) threatens to transforms art into a thing that exists
only for exhibition. This schema, susceptible to the logic of positivism,
Benjamin acknowledges leaves un-resolved the contradictorily impulse to
realize an art that is both immutable (eternal) and one that is forever
changing and political in its aesthetic.
