A few weeks ago, I bought four posters for my dorm room: Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone, Wassily Kandinsky's Farbstudie Quadrate, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and (because I couldn't have walls covered with only serious pieces of art) Homer Simpson's Edvard Munch Scream.
These posters are, of course, only reproductions of classics. So although I wouldn't technically be lying if I were to say that I have a Van Gogh hanging above my bed, no one would let me get away with claiming that I do. What is it, then, that separates "Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888. Paris, Musée d'Orsay" and "Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone, 2009. Philadelphia, Wilson Room 303"? Aren't they identical images with the same color, composition and value?
In my Cinema Studies class last year, we read a text by German essayist and critic Walter Benjamin titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)." Benjamin argued that the reproducibility of art allowed by the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution degrades the work and results in the loss of its "aura," the awe-inspiring experience of witnessing the piece up close. The cheap "exhibition value" of reproductions displaces the inherent "cult value" of the authentic artwork.
Indeed, it's one thing to look at a photocopied Starry Night stuck to my wall with tape. It's quite another (I assume) to observe the original -- to bask in the magnificence of its Post-Impressionist aura in the Musée d'Orsay.
A century after the end of the Industrial Revolution, we find ourselves in the heyday of the Digital Revolution. Seventy-three years after Benjamin published his essay on reproducibility, I am publishing the first post of my first blog. In these entries, I replicate my thoughts, my ideas and myself -- offer myself for exhibition. This blog is not my first digital reproduction; I've already made copies of myself on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and countless other websites.
As I start this blog, I hope that Benjamin's critique of reproduction limits itself to the twentieth century. I hope the work of art in the age of digital reproduction can find a way to use the piece's exhibition value to augment its cult value. I hope the publication and replication of my thoughts in this blog don't do too much harm to the aura of my real self. And I hope that if you ever meet the real me, your impression won't have suffered terribly from knowing my digital reproductions (just as I hope that looking at a poster print of Nighthawks every day only helps me to appreciate the real work of art that much better if I ever go see it in Chicago).
3 comments:
You raise some interesting points--however, in the heyday of the Digital Revolution, even the most insightful of art critics' ruminations lose some of their cult value to Internet-fueled mass reproduction when conveyed to the public; the laissez-faire masses, if you will. For instance, have we really captured the essence of your thought train on reading a page-long Blogger post? Surely nothing but a lengthy personal discourse will do.
Without a doubt today's media culture mindset is relentlessly pushing toward stream-of-thought publishing and ever-more-disposable public entertainment. The only logical conclusion is that truly original objets d'art have lost their worth and remain as anachronistic reminders of a more romantic time.
Are we as a fast-food society irrevocably susceptible to addictive, transient entertainment? Yes. But that doesn't mean the more enlightened among us cannot treasure the inherent value and cult worth of such original pieces. Sine qua non, compadres. Let your taste be the judge.
we just talked about Benjamin's article in my urban studies class on tuesday!!
we are studying Joseph Cornell, who is famous for making these boxes that are essentially just collections of other objects. he also made this movie called Rose Hobart that consists entirely of footage stolen from another movie. i feel like if you're completely repurposing someone else's work, then you have rights to what you create, but it is interesting to consider where that line is...
Nice post and Very great informative blog. I love your post:-)
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