Week 4 - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Ars-onist

Does the mechanical apparatus suppresses the authenticity and the aura of the art works?

Mechanical reproduction accelerated the process of art so ‘that it could keep pace with speech,’ which was something unprecedented before and during the time of the essay’s writing. The authenticity and ‘aura’ is argued to be disappeared because the uniqueness of an artwork loses its meaning by means of reproduction. But has the aura truly disappeared? Decades after the essay’s publication, Andy Warhol created his first silkscreen piece of the Marilyn Diptych. Recreated 50 times but not exactly the same, the work was a nod to the mass production of goods about a ‘manufactured’ star. Her suicide and celebrity status created an iconic figure in Marilyn Monroe, which brought an ‘aura’ to the work: the idolization and cult status of a dead, romanticized figure.

Walter Benjamin discusses the tension between the attention span of the individual as opposed to the one of the masses. In a context of a gallery an individual would take a greater amount of time to let himself be absorbed into a painting whereas a group would be more interested in a general sensation of the apparatus rather than the true meaning of each work of art. In Loving Vincent, a biographical movie about Van Gogh, each frame is a different painting of its own in the style of Van Gogh. The composition of these frames suppressed their individual value in favor of shorter and simpler narrative to follow for a spectator. Therefore, there is a shifting of the aura from an individual to the collective one.