A Confute on Walter Benjamin’s Anti-Pluralist view on Film and Photography
Does mechanical production promote unoriginality? Is contemporary art losing its aura?
Benjamin began his essay by reiterating the Marxist perspective that capitalism is a system that functions to exploit the laboring class. The acceleration of the capitalist mode of production is too “intense” according to him and with that, he prognostically discussed how mechanical production can influence the way that audiences interact with film, and how those audiences reconcile film with their pre-existing value structures and beliefs — primarily by “brushing aside a number of outmoded concepts” and by modifying previous methods of criticism. He claimed that the standardization of technically reproducing “all transmitted works of art” and the art of the film in specific, will have implications on the view of art in its more traditional form.
Understanding Benjamin’s argument, it becomes clear that his primary objective is to reverberate the preservation of art in its traditional domain. Benjamin focused on criticizing the innovation and changing forms of graphic art. He discussed how the process of reproduction removes the reproduced art object after being replicated outside the realm of tradition. As his main subject for criticism, photography in Benjamin’s claim, “freed the hand of the most important artistic functions” and henceforth “devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens”. In the first part, he recalled these more important functions as the following: creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery. Benjamin explains that one cannot refer to the scene captured on film as the “authentic” in the same way that we refer to a manually drawn illustration as the “original” because the camera lens creates art from its subject matter — however, critically analyzing it, the photographic subject alone is not art, it’s the photograph itself and capturing through lenses does not necessarily delete the creativity and genius of the artist and the photograph/film’s eternal value as an art piece.
Benjamin’s argument is partially debatable because it implies politically conservative assumptions, such as replicated artwork lacking “time and space” as they are “forged” and lack the authenticity present in the original; that reproduced art is practically unnecessary. His claim that mechanically reproduced art has no assertion of singularity is, however, valid, as photographs and films nowadays do not have to maintain a single tangible copy of their works. Postmodern artists, especially photographers, don’t conform to a centralized authority because they distribute their works publicly. In mixed media art, random photos from unknown photographers are etched and manipulated into collages along with digitally created icons and texts; this represents art being accessible to the mass, despite the fact that a photographer’s “original” art is technically reproduced, making it impossible for him to claim that photograph as his original work.
Benjamin’s particular critique on photography and film, inferring art to be “devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens” depreciates these new media into merely telecom tools. This is not always the case as the deliberate use of earlier styles and conventions is now present. How Benjamin directly interrelates an art object’s (such as a reproduced photograph) aura will always be relative to an art-viewer. As an art critic, he valued qualities such as formalism, and advocated the Marxist view that valued “originality” such as explaining the technique and methodology of the composition of a certain artwork. However, this isn’t always as important in photographs and films and this fright of plurality will only limit one’s appreciation tothe hyperrealist and profound tendencies of art.
