Walter Benjamin and the Impact of Technological Reproduction on Art

Walter Benjamin is known as 'the last intellectual in Europe'. He was inactive during his lifetime and was ignored by the academic community. His thoughts began to receive attention in the half-century after his death. Some of his views have been cited by various post-modern schools, but few are willing to systematically study Benjamin. Benjamin was a phenomenon.

In the 1930s, the dark clouds of the Nazis began to cover Europe. When the people were immersed in the carnival of technological worship, Benjamin elaborated through his meticulous observations on drama, poetry, and movies.

The formation process and characteristics of modern people's psychological mechanism, the changes of aesthetics in the process of modernization, and the prediction of the hidden dangers of modernity, and these prophecies have now become the dilemma we have to face. is an aesthetic paper written by Benjamin in 1935, in which Benjamin explored the influence of art on the large-scale application of art, and illustrated photography (including movies) as an example.

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The unique aesthetic characteristics of modern art, the root of this change, and predict the impact of the rise of public consciousness on artistic creation and the resulting tremendous destructive power.

In a long period of time, art is difficult to copy and the means of copying are cumbersome. Therefore, traditional art is unique. This situation changed when technology replication occurred. The development of printing has increased the number of magazines. More people have the opportunity to express their own opinions through writing, and the rise of popular culture has begun to change. The invention of photography, as the greatest achievement of mechanical reproduction, directly changes the way people perceive, and this change is a social condition of dizziness. It has mainly changed into two aspects: the reproduction of works of art and how film art counteracts traditional art.

The faintness shrouded in traditional art is mainly reflected in two aspects: the moment and the originality. At this moment, sex is a kind of history. It includes changes in the structure of matter and changes in the relationship of possession. It cannot be copied. Primality is all the essence of a thing that circulates from the moment of origin. Technology replication poses a huge threat to authenticity.

The emergence of technical reproduction makes the imitation no longer dependent on the original, making the prototype available for everyone to appreciate. The traditional aura is shaken, the uniqueness is replaced, and the recipient can appreciate the artwork in their own environment. The distance between art and the mass is lost, art is no longer sacred, the public can enjoy replicas on this occasion, the gods are moved down the altar, and the praise song becomes pop music.

However, art has requirements for its recipients. After the emergence of technological reproduction, it is no longer the public acceptance of art, but the rise of art to the public and the public consciousness is the social foundation of the decline. The public wants to draw closer to art and is accustomed to classifying unique art.

There are two values for appreciation of art: worship value and exhibition value. Worship value is closely related to the origin of art. It is a kind of etiquette, the evolution of religious worship, and the spirit is purified in the process of appreciating art. Technology replication highlights the value of the latter. In early photography, the value of worship still has the last line of defense - portrait.

By capturing the fleeting expression of a face, the remembrance of a long-lasting or deceased love is the last refuge of the worship value of the painting. The result of the debate between painting and photography is the loss of worship value. When Arte's Paris streetscape photos were esteemed, the value of the exhibition was in the first place.

Photography also threatens the status of actors in artistic creation. It turns the communication between actors and people into communication with the machine. The performance of the person is decomposed in front of the camera, and the identity of the performer is separated from the character, so the performance loses its reality and deviates from the performance of the beauty. When filmmakers realized this, in order to create a dizzy, they produced star worship. The reproduction of technology also gave the public a voice and countered art. Everyone can be an actor and express themselves.

For the difference between painters and photographers, Benjamin uses witch doctors and surgeons as examples. The painter keeps a distance from the object being photographed, and the whole performance, the photographer enters the interior, and the fragments are assembled according to certain rules.

Observations of art include two attitudes. Criticism and appreciation. Criticism and appreciation are separated in traditional art, and in the face of technical reproduction of art, criticism and appreciation coexist. People watch a movie together in a movie theater. In this simultaneous acceptance process, the individual's attitude is restricted by the collective attitude.

Because art has requirements for the public because the level of the recipient is different, the attitude of the observer is different, and the advanced audience facing an absurd film performance may be behind in the face of a surrealist work. The acceptance of the synchronicity of art has contributed to the rise of public consciousness.

In the period when the film was just flourishing, Benjamin was keenly aware of its powerful destructive power to traditional art and its unique charm. The film expands the space for performance in the objective world. The time is extended by slow motion, and the close-up lens allows the space that people consciously pass to be replaced by the space that is unconsciously traversed. The form of experience of the film is closely related to the psychological mechanism of modern people.

It is one of the manifestations of Benjamin’s “shock experience”. In the psychological mechanism of modern people, I believe that watching is much more than believing, and that vision is placed first in all senses. Under the threat of movies, traditional art began to no longer adapt to people's psychological experience. Benjamin also observed that every art form will usher in its heyday before its demise, showing extremes in the crisis. Rough. Dadaism is the use of painting to express what the film has to express, deliberately destroying the dizziness.

In this era of mechanical reproduction, the public consciousness rises, it affects the development of art, and the faint loses its soil. At the end of the book, Benjamin expressed his critique of the futurist Nazi political aesthetics. Fascism takes advantage of the public consciousness and gives the public an opportunity to express themselves without changing ownership.

Invade the public through leader worship and force the machine to produce worship value. If the natural use of productivity is contained by ownership, it will evolve into an unnatural application. The public needs a goal to express itself, and the best goal set for a large-scale mass movement is war. The futurists beautify the war and raise the destruction to the category of beauty. 'Advocating art to destroy the world' is the theory of 'art for art'. This aesthetic, which regards one's own destruction as the highest aesthetic enjoyment, will eventually lead to the alienation of the human self.

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