Everyone’s a critic, but “at the movies this position requires no attention. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.īenjamin’s analysis of conventional film, especially, leads him to conclude that its reception required so little of viewers that they easily become distracted. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers-at first, occasional ones. Many readings tend to leave aside the politics of its epilogue, likely since “his remedy,” writes Michael Jay - “the politicization of art by Communism - was forgotten by all but his most militant Marxist interpreters,” and hardly seemed like much of a remedy during the Cold War, when Benjamin became more widely available in translation.īenjamin’s own idiosyncratic politics aside, his essay anticipates a crisis of authorship and authority currently surfacing in the investigation of a failed coup that includes Twitter replies as key evidence - and in the use of social media more generally as a dominant form of political spectacle. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.īenjamin’s focus on the medium as not only expressive but constitutive of meaning has made his essay a staple on communications and media theory course syllabi, next to the work of Marshall McLuhan. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. We make offerings to cults of personality, expanded in our time to include influencers and revered and reviled billionaires and political figures who joust in the headlines like professional wrestlers, led around by the chief of all heels. Mass media - which for Benjamin meant radio, photography, and film - turns us all into potential actors, critics, experts, he wrote, and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spectacle. The essay makes for potent reading today. Its loss, Benjamin argued, was a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon caused by mass media’s imposition of distance between object and viewer, though it appears to bring art closer through a simulation of intimacy. Aura relates to the physical proximity between objects and their viewers. In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art.
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