![]() What it aims at representing might be conceptually part of reality, however, is not so anymore in the second it gets transformed into a film narrative. A camera enables various settings, various ways in which reality as such can be twisted and turned. In being able to switch from the contemplative perception of art towards the artificial and potentially only represented manner, it signifies a major change: by using a camera, what is genuinely considered real is not the reality anymore. On a fundamental level, photography and film are the largest forms of such a means. It can now display and stir its audience. Due to this development, a change in the qualitative nature of art perception enabled a new functionality of art: art has the potential to emit and to manipulate the spectator. The cult value of it, so groundedness in tradition, got emancipated through exhibiting it and further enhanced through reproduction. Art bears a strong socio-cultural importance, however, it is utilised through mechanical reproduction in order to function politically. In a society in which distances are aimed to be minimised and masses brought together, the decay of the “aura” is formed through the approximation of reality to the masses and vice versa. The mechanical reproduction of art detaches it from its origin, it limits the naturally unique existence and it leads to a diminishment of the artwork´s authority over the spectator. What Benjamin points out here is in its essence a shift in power relations and streams of cause and effect from the artwork towards the observer of it. The art piece´s authenticity, scope and authority in itself are limited through the ability of these techniques to interfere with the spectator, either by providing him with material he could not perceive by himself or by actively changing elements of the artwork in the course of reproduction. Mechanical reproduction takes away from what he calls the “aura” of an artwork - the unique qualia of its existence in time and space and the accompanying distance between the observer and the piece. In his famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin is tapping into these concepts by dubbing the mechanisation of art reproduction as a somewhat change in paradigm in terms of art theory. The Effect of Mechanical Reproduction on Art ![]() What is our relationship with art? How does the dawn of great innovations transform our perception of the qualia of things and in which ways does this alteration turn us, the spectator, into utilising art as a form of commodity? Does this change imply alterations in how we experience our existence through art? ![]()
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