The Faux Shaux

While I found the majority of the reading pleonastic, there were certainly interesting comparisons made.  Benjamin analyzes the effects technology has on art and, as inferred by the title, specifically how the ability to reproduce the piece augments its meaning, as well as varies the how we regard the medium.  It is also briefly mentioned how the aesthetic can change to facilitate ease of reproduction.

Benjamin interprets the advancements in speed of reproduction as a change from the skilled artisan to the precise technician.  With his comparison of painting and film, Benjamin describes this recent shift in paradigm.

He uses painting to represent the original work, with an “authenticity,” never obscured from its meaning, having a lineage of owners, a specific locale, etc.  He explains that the reproduction, once considered fraudulent, lacks the aura of the original.  Does not hold a legacy like that of the original.

He then quotes a handful of early film critiques who’d judged moving pictures to be anti-intellectual and ineffective.  He goes on to point out that they were using an obsolete rubric for the new medium.  He argues that the painting was to the cult appeal as the lens was to politics.  I am not completely sure how to understand his use of the word political here.  I want to say that a series of pictures establishes relationships among all the subject matter in a way that a still image does not impose.  So I want to believe he just means establishing relationships, and not governmental philosophy, but then he again, he opens and closes his essay with communist references.  But how could every film instill a philosophical ideal?

“(Mankind’s) self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.  This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.  Communism responds by politicizing art.”  Proceeded by the “Fiat ars pereas mundus” (let art be created though the world may perish), is this really the Fascist ideal or is this the Futurist ideal?  I feel like the better comparison should have been left between the Marxist vs. Homeric ideals.