Name: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
ISBN: 9780674024458

Walter Benjamin

Benjamin’s famous “Work of Art“ essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on media and on culture in general. This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the “Work of Art“ essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the modern media.

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

Made me think about the boundaries of authenticity that have existed through time with easily reproducible art form, from a committee authorizing whether a Rodin sculpture is authentic, to the NFT fad a few years ago where people tried to put artificial authenticity tags to an ultra-reproducible art form

Haley Park

The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it. Since the historical testimony is founded on the physical duration, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction, in which the physical duration plays no part. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object, hte weight it derives from tradition. 

The impact of technical reproducibility to the quality of art

Will we ever have a timeless digital artwork? Or software? 

The Greeks had only two ways of technologically reproducing works of art: casting and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only artworks they could produce in large numbers. All others were unique and could not be technologically reproduced. That is why they had to be made for all eternity. 

The state of their technology compelled the Greeks to produce eternal values in their art.

(...) This quality is its capacity for improvement. The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created at a single stroke. It is assembled from a very large number of images and image sequences that offer an array of choices to the editor; these images, moreover, can be improved in any desired way in the process leading from the initial take to the final cut. (...) 

And this capability is linked to its radical renunciation of eternal value.

 This is corroborated by the fact that for the Greeks, whose art depended on the production of eternal values, the pinnacle of all the arts was the form least capable of improvement—namely sculpture, whose products are literally all of a piece. In the age of the assembled [*montierbar*] artwork, the decline of sculpture is inevitable. 

Written in a time where film was the most tehnologically reproducible art form, and now we're at a time where film is facing an existential crisis