Reaction Essay on Movie “Shadow Magic” and Article “the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin.

Art has been recreated in many ways over the ages. In the past, the main means of recreating would have been to be in front of the original and then to attempt to make an identical copy. The downside is that there would always be some flaw or difference. On the positive side, this would still allow far more people to view it. Overtime as technology advanced we have developed new ways to reproduce art. The next major jump in technology lead us to the invention of the camera. The camera allowed someone to take a picture of the original, which was far more accurate version of reproduction. The camera also allowed people to create multiple prints of the photo, meaning a greater amount of people could to view the image. Berger did not care for what the camera has done for art as he suggests “The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided.” (Berger,114) Technology has advanced even further since John wrote this literature, but I believe he would be even more disgusted by digital media. With digital media, we are capable of spreading an image across the world in seconds, and anyone can view it.

With images, words, and sounds been almost endlessly reproduced and distributed, various critics of modern culture suggest that traditional ideas about art and authenticity are no longer applicable. The problem is said to have been noticed back in the 1930s in the popular essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that was concerned about what would happen to the “aura” of unique works of art when photography and other techniques if anybody could make unlimited copies of images. With the rise of digital technology, copying ability became vast and complex and hence the idea of originality is thrown into

Throughout human history people used to capture the reality of their time, express their feelings and share their impressions by copying both literally or figurative the mundane. The so-called artists have had different impacts in society all along the centuries. Only a few are currently taught in school, although the reverberation of their work is still impregnated in XXI Century. Nowadays, the term ‘artist’ can be used in reference of painters, sculptors, writers, singers, choreographers and other professions whose production are considered valuable culturally speaking. One of the main problems is that their work produce such a magnificent impact on the audience the artist is set aside and usually forgotten as a person, so they feel their rights to be violated.

The earliest forms of art had made it’s mark in history for being an influential and unique representation of various cultures and religions as well as playing a fundamental role in society. However, with the new era of postmodernism, art slowly deviated away from both the religious context it was originally created in, and apart from serving as a ritual function. Walter Benjamin, a German literary critic and philosopher during the 1900’s, strongly believed that the mass production of pieces has freed art from the boundaries of tradition, “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependance on ritual” (Benjamin 1992). This particular excerpt has a direct correlation with

The essays by Berger and Benjamin are similar in several ways in the sense that they follow a common theme and put forward similar arguments. Mechanical reproduction changed the way we view and experience art. Their perspectives on the reproduction of art changed our thinking and feelings for what it can bring.

Art is a human construct, it is bound to the artist that creates it just like each person is bound to the age in which they live. Art is as much a part of the artist, as words are part of the person that spoke them. It is the Human Spirit to want to progress from your predecessor, to use your forerunner's knowledge to break away and accomplish more. Art, being intrinsically entertained with the Human Spirit follows this trend. Each style having a base of knowledge from a previous style, but instead of replicating it, taking it further. Thus art reflects the Human Spirit's want to progress as much as it reflects the artist that created it and the time it was created in.

Despite the similarities to modern art surrounding subject matter, there can be no doubt that that Renaissance artists broke the static mold of contemporary art. First of all, though the themes of modern art have remained fairly constant, the style of the Renaissance was unique in its combination of modern and ancient influences. However, what is most remarkable about the art of the Renaissance is the constant evolution of techniques and

Art has been a part of history before Christ was born and along the flow of time different styles and movements revolutionized what art means to the creator and audience. On the flow of time one of the branches that stood out in style, color, and expression through repetition was Impressionism. An artist that helped revolutionize Impressionism in his time was Oscar-Claude Monet, but the piece that stood out was the “Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur.”

Art is an integral part of any human society. It has the ability to mold and shape

In the reading “The Work of Art in the Age of It’s Technological Reproducibility”, by W. Benjamin he expresses his point of view on the loss of the traditional aspect and “aura” of art that is seen within today’s society. He also speaks about the way that photography has become a device for the mass reproduction of images and has begun to eliminate this aspect of authenticity that places an image in a specific place and time. The person that is behind the camera forces people to see what he or she wants them to see. It changes the moral and traditional conventions that may have once been associated with an image. In his article he doesn’t completely reject this idea of reproduction he also expands on the idea that although authenticity is an issue, within film you are able to do what paintings cannot.

In the early 20th Century, western history has entered a new era with the fast development of modernization, industrialization and the technologies. The machines took over the human labor they gradually replace the important role of human in the process of making and change the ways people live, started the fast pace, high speed of modern lifestyle. Modern art approached with a number of painter, sculptures, poets who individually or collectively to redefine through around this century. The new art forms are creative world’s response to the perspective of the new lives and ideas provided by the industrialized and technological advances that results modern society to evolve itself in a new way. Many artists began to experiment and

1.Has the mechanical reproduction of art opened up possibilities of a more democratic appreciation, or merely reduced it to the status of a commodity?

Walter Benjamin, a German Jew who lived during the early 20th century, often combined elements of Marxism, German idealism, Jewish theory, and aesthetic principles into his work. One of his most famous essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, focused on discernment of art with the introduction of technological methods of rapidly reproducing it. Benjamin used the idea of ‘aura’ to center his arguments around. Aura, as defined by Benjamin is ‘"A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be (Benjamin 23)” The somewhat cryptic description of this term exhibits its quite enigmatic meaning. Aura, in simple terms, is the way in which something is perceived in relation to its environment and its character.

An artist expresses his emotions and imagination in his artwork, but there is a major challenge that he faces with delivering his intensions in a clear manner. Some may say abstract art is meaningless, and as a matter of fact, it is not art, for no emotional bonding is being created. Similarly, some may argue that nonobjective artwork is not art for it does not hold a direct connotation. This is where the humans’ capacity of understanding each other plays a major role. We tend to judge others by using our own experiences as the base. We may find one artist’s work beautiful and the other’s ugly due to our altering perspective of beauty. This is why art is defined as an emotional connection between the artist and his audience, because different people have altering views about identifying emotions. Therefore, if the artist is able to convey some feelings in his artifacts, it should be considered art.

Much of what Benjamin discusses in his essay has to do with what he describes as the “aura” or spirit of an artwork. He discusses this spirit and how it is obtained, lost, given and received. He suggests that the aura of an artwork we know and understand today is much different from how it was understood in the time and place of its production. The aura Benjamin speaks of is obtained because of the artwork’s uniqueness and authenticity, which in turn is lost due the act of mass production. In describing this