![]() Benjamin reviews the historical and technological developments of the means for the mechanical reproduction of art, and their effects upon society's valuation of a work of art. Benjamin explains that the reproduction of art is not an exclusively modern human activity, citing examples such as artists manually copying the work of a master artist. He then explains the socio-economic conditions to extrapolate developments that further the economic exploitation of the proletariat, whence arise the social conditions that would abolish capitalism. In the Preface, Benjamin presents Marxist analyses of the organisation of a capitalist society and establishes the place of the arts in the public sphere and in the private sphere. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. ![]() But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) Walter Benjamin presents the thematic basis for a theory of art by quoting the essay "The Conquest of Ubiquity" (1928), by Paul Valéry, to establish how works of art created and developed in past eras are different from contemporary works of art that the understanding and treatment of art and of artistic technique must progressively develop in order to understand a work of art in the context of the modern time. The original essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility", was published in three editions: (i) the German edition, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in 1935 (ii) the French edition, L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction mécanisée, in 1936 and (iii) the German revised edition in 1939, from which derive the contemporary English translations of the essay titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". The subject and themes of Benjamin's essay: the aura of a work of art the artistic authenticity of the artefact its cultural authority and the aestheticization of politics for the production of art, became resources for research in the fields of art history and architectural theory, cultural studies and media theory. Written during the Nazi régime (1933–1945) in Germany, Benjamin's essay presents a theory of art that is "useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art" in a mass-culture society. That in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics. " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), by Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes and explains that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura (uniqueness) of an objet d'art. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), Walter Benjamin addresses the artistic and cultural, social, economic, and political functions of art in a capitalist society.
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