The Role of Art in the Age of 'Virtual Reproduction'
Insider #85 with important ideas from a 90-year old document
Note: This is one part of a series of posts on the essay by Walter Benjamin. Read here: The Role of Art in the Age of 'Virtual Reproduction' | The Concept of Aura | What is Art keeps changing | Free Contemplation of Art | Freewriting | Everyone should own art
Dear Insider,
I am reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. It was written in 1936; you can read it for free here.
But why am I reading this nearly 90-year old document? The answer is on the first page itself:
The 1930s were a time of great flux in the world of art. Movements like surrealism, cubism, fauvism, dadaism etc emerged as photography and emergent printing technologies led to an existential crisis for fine art. As per critic Arthur Danto writing the “The End of Art”, this was when the first narrative of art ended - i.e. its job to depict reality. I have previously shared my impressions of Arthur Danto’s popular essay where he speaks about the first and second time that art ended.
Today, confronting the behemoth of artificial intelligence, art is in flux again. We might call it a third existential crisis.
What is the point of making art if an AI can reproduce it within seconds and at zero cost? What happens to human artists when corporations and movie studios switch to Artificial Intelligence outputs? Since we cannot compete with machines over speed or scale, is art even a human endeavour anymore? If not this, then what?
I had been thinking about these questions already for a while before
, in response to my Note above, pointed me toward Walter Benjamin. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been reading “The Role of Art…” and making notes in the margins of my copy as well as my journal.Reading is not the best word to describe what I am doing. I am meditating on the words. I read slowly. When I like a paragraph, I read it again. I take long pauses. I let the thoughts circle in my mind, interact and play with one another. I let them percolate deeper. I express them in my own words. I re-read both the original and my notes, and allow new thoughts to emerge.
It is not difficult to relate to the writer’s point of view in 1936, and transposing it to my 2023 reality has been nothing short of a revelation. Chapter by chapter, I want to share these thoughts with you. In this week’s Insider Post, reflections on chapters I and II.
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Chapter I
“In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again.”