Reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye.
(Thesis 3)

When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever.
(Thesis 7)

Introduction

This is at the same time the most Marxist, the most famous and the most fruitful of Walter Benjamin’s essays. It opens and closes with surprisingly blunt political calls to revolution. (These are discreetly dropped whenever you see the essay referred to in the wall labels and text surrounding current art exhibitions and catalogues.)

The basic idea is simple: an original work of art has a unique ‘aura’ whereas reproductions – in prints, posters, photos, magazines and so on – don’t. This is bad. It reflects the general decline and fall of society, art and authenticity, and the rise of mass society and mass culture, which we have found Benjamin lamenting in his other essays.

In fact he spends as much or more time on the nature of film as on art, and many of his insights have formed the basis for the ideas in modern film and media studies courses.

The essay is divided into 15 very short sections or theses, with a Preface at the front and Epilogue at the end.

Preface

Unlike his usual meandering belle-lettreist reflections, this essay opens by straightaway invoking Marxist theory. In its tone of revolutionary stridency, it reads almost as if it was commissioned by the Communist Party. He cites Marx’s fundamental idea that en route to the great day of the revolution, industrial capitalism would inevitably, by its very nature, steadily grow the ranks of the exploited proletariat, also known as the masses. In his day, 1935, it felt like this mass culture had arrived, which is why the essay might start with rather rarefied notions about art and authenticity, but will move onto the art form most appropriate for mass society, namely film.

But first the Marxist rhetoric.

Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself. (p.219)

To this end the two-page preface ends with a promise that the theses listed in his essay are intended to have a practical revolutionary application. They are intended to be ‘a weapon’.

They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery-concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

This kind of straightout declaration of communist faith is very unusual for Benjamin.

Section 1. Historical review of means of reproducing art works

Benjamin starts with a brief survey of the means of reproducing works of art from antiquity (sculptures) through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance (woodcuts). Obviously the invention of printing led to the vast expansion of the reproduction of texts, previously hand-written.

At the start of the 19th century, the invention of lithography (which anticipates the mass market newspaper) and then in mid-century, photography (which anticipates film). This essay will consider:

The repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.

Photography, then moving pictures, have added huge new layers to our understanding of reality, capturing a world of detail nobody up till then had noticed or even knew existed.

Section 2. Authenticity and authority

Any reproduction lacks the presence of the original in time and space. An original work of art always shows signs of wear and tear and decay, and also (less obviously) bears with it its history of ownership.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

Reproduction affects ‘authenticity’ in two ways: 1) process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction, for example blowing up a photograph of a painting reveals details invisible to the naked eye; 2) reproduction puts the image in places inaccessible to the original; above all, a reproduction comes to meet the viewer rather than the viewer having to go and meet it. True of art and also (something he doesn’t mention so much) of phonograph recordings of (classical) music.

When this happens to a work of art, ‘the quality of its presence is always depreciated.’ Benjamin insists on the notion of ‘the authenticity’ of an art work. What does this mean? He describes it various times in various ways:

Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with…

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.

Benjamin himself realises this is a problematic concept and keeps on trying to define and refine it.

Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when  substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

‘The authority of the object’ is a very pregnant phrase. You might have thought that a revolutionary communist would be against bourgeois ‘authority’ but it’s in phrases like this that Benjamin reveals himself as a conservative bourgeois.

It’s at this point that he moves on from authenticity to aura, an idea he first developed in the Baudelaire essay and will become key here.

One might subsume the eliminated element [what is lost from the artwork in reproduction] in the term aura and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

Then goes on to make a revealing claim:

One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition…

Authority and tradition – these are clearly bourgeois concepts. The 1) undermining the uniqueness of the object and 2) bringing it closer to the masses (into their newspapers and magazines):

…lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition…

Tradition again. But not just this. Benjamin situates these claims in the framework of his radical political worldview (or at least, the one he’s pretending to have for the sake of this essay) when he claims that this ‘shattering of tradition’ is itself a symptom – in the realm of art – of the general social and political collapse he sees happening all around by the late 1930s:

a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.

Benjamin claims that he was living in a world of unparalleled social masses, whose most appropriate technological corollary was film. With typical negativity and pessimism, he sees film as having a particularly destructive impact. Film’s

social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.

Now I despise film as a medium, for its superficiality and childishness, but no-one in their right mind would countenance the notion that films have ‘liquidated’ ‘the traditional value of the cultural heritage.’ The cultural heritage is still there, and film has just taken its place alongside earlier media and forms. This is the viewpoint of an arch-conservative, profoundly at odds with his time.

Section 3. The destruction of ‘distance’

Benjamin switches focus to claim that the modes of human perception have (naturally enough) changed in changing societies. Like all these Western Marxists he only looks at European examples, and goes back over the same inevitable chronology (ancient Greece, ancient Rome, late antiquity, early Middle Ages and so on).

I thought this would lead into a consideration of how human perception has been changed by these new technologies, but instead there’s a slight digression into the subject of distance. It is very telling that he says that a vital component of the aura is the sense of the art work’s distance from the viewer:

We define the aura… as the unique phenomenon of a distance…

And so what he dislikes is reproductions being brought closer ‘to the masses’.

The desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly… is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell [is] to destroy its aura…

Distance, reverence, awe, tradition, these are the things he values and you can see how they reflect his upbringing in an educated middle-class Jewish household. Bringing reproductions of works of art closer to the masses is what he hates. All these changes are part of what he calls ‘The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality’, a social and cultural transformation of vast scope.

But why – the innocent reader asks – shouldn’t ‘the masses’ (surely a term indicating extreme elitism and condescension) see reproductions of great works of art up close? Maybe the real underlying meaning of ‘tradition’ is ‘keeping it from the masses’?

Section 4. Arts origins in cult objects

Tradition again:

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition.

Benjamin goes back in history, again, to posit the origin of art works as cult objects used in religious rituals. This allows him to make the following statement which confirms my sense that Benjamin’s position is, deep down, religious and not materialist:

It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.

According to Benjamin the ritualistic basis of art was long ago secularised but in many of attributes retains its cult origins and assumptions [such as, although he doesn’t explicitly say so, the silence of the art gallery, hushed reverence before The Work].

With the advent of photography the underpinnings of art experienced a crisis. Benjamin says it replied with the 1880s doctrine of art for art’s sake, which he describes as almost a theology.

[Several thoughts occur in response to this. One is that Benjamin really misses a trick in the whole essay. As a good Marxist he should have shown in far greater detail how the changes in nineteenth century art movements from the impressionists onwards were the result of changing technologies, which themselves contributed to changes in what Marx called the relations of production i.e. the economy. He describes art for art’s sake as a theological development of thinking about art (p.226), quite overlooking the way it was a response to two socio-economic developments: the mass production of cheap goods (which William Morris, also, reacted against in his Arts and Craft movement) but also the impact of the European empires which a) provided unprecedented amounts of raw materials and b) provided models of Oriental luxury and decadence to be copied. Benjamin doesn’t mention how the whole art movement of symbolism was an attempt to save or maintain the mystic religious impulse in an age when traditional Christian faith was becoming untenable. He doesn’t explain how German Expressionism, and the move to abstraction which came out of it, were hugely indebted to the rise of occultist spiritualities (theosophy and so on) which were themselves also attempts to create a ‘spiritual’ alternative to traditional Christianity which was widely felt to have become moribund. And so on. All that, a detailed socio-economic analysis of the art movements of the half century leading up to his time, is omitted from this essay.]

This section concludes with the thought that the widespread of mechanical reproduction means that for the first time in human history, art has been utterly separated from its origins in ritual [is this true?]. Not only this, but reproduction turns the motives for making artworks on their head. Instead of producing a unique work which contains an aura, traces of its tradition, the legacy of ritual etc, ‘the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility’.

And he then goes on to make a tenuous link to the political context of the essay:

From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

This feels like a very big leap from all that’s gone before. It feels like his twisting his own ideas to meet the political requirements of the editors of the magazine where the essay was published (in Volume 5, Issue 1 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, journal of the Frankfurt School journal then in exile in New York).

Section 5. Cult value and exhibition value

Benjamin gives a brief history of works of art from cave man days through the Middle Ages, designed to prove his point that works of art in history have been received and valued in two different ways: for their cult value and their exhibition value.

Cult objects were mostly hidden; exhibition objects are made to be, well, exhibited. Exhibition value has triumphed to such an extent that it has changed the nature of art itself.

[Art’s] fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature.

And:

…by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions…

Photography and film embody this new function for art. [You’d like to know what these new functions are but the section breaks off and the next one starts without him explaining.]

Section 6. Refuge of cult value in early photographic portraits

He suggests that the cult value aspect of works of art hasn’t been completely overthrown; it has lived on in the way the first works of photography which were overwhelmingly portraits (making me think of Julia Margaret Cameron) – although he casts it in his characteristically end-of-the-world rhetoric:

It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.

But:

as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value.

He illustrates this idea with the photographs of Eugène Atget who, he says, around 1900 pioneered photos of big city streets, eerily emptied of all people, shot in a way that makes them look like crime scenes. These, Benjamin claims, assume a kind of political significance, though he frustratingly doesn’t explain why. More comprehensibly, he says photos demonstrate their exhibition value by requiring captions in a way works of art don’t.

Same goes for film: in silent movies the action was indicated by captions explaining what was going on. In talkies, more subtly, any given moment is explained by all the preceding scenes which have led up to it.

Section 7. Are photography or film art forms?

This section raises the old chestnut of whether photography is itself an art. Benjamin says this debate misses the broader point of the impact photography had on the entire conception of art. (It is a truism, a cliché of art history, that the advent of photography as a record of what’s actually there freed modern art to record how the scene appears i.e. impressionism, which developed into the idea of exploring the impact of non-naturalistic shapes and colours on the viewer i.e. post-impressionism, and then onto abstraction and modern art as a whole.)

But he regards arguments about photography as passé and swiftly moves onto the newer, more radical form, film. He quotes three or four theorists of early film from the 1920s gushing over how film is a new art form but uses quotes which highlight how they do so by smuggling into film the old values of ritual, religion and cult, which has been asserting underpin the traditional notion of the artwork.

[Reading these quotes suggests a different idea, which is the incorrigible habit of critics to value the new using concepts from the old; specifically, their refusal to throw off religious notions of spirituality or even morality, and embrace purely aesthetic responses.]

Section 8. The alienation of the film actor

He’s now definitely moved on from photography to film, and tells us that the film actor no longer has the organic relationship the stage actor has with their audience. The stage actor is experienced in real time and can adjust their performance to the audience’s response. The film actor is barely an actor at all but an object created by countless cuts between different camera angles. The film actor has no opportunity to adjust their performance to the audience response.

Similarly, whereas the audience of a play has an organic response to the human beings on stage, the audience of a film is really responding to the camera, or the editor, or the director, as much as to any human content.

The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.

Section 9. More alienated actors

Benjamin quotes the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello who shrewdly wrote that the film actor has ceased to perform for human beings but for the demands of the camera. Hence his feeling of being disembodied, empty and alienated.

Benjamin projects onto Pirandello’s notion of alienation his own idea of the loss of the aura.

For the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

He continues with the thought that the film actor’s work is cut up into lots of pieces, parts of the same scene may be shot months apart, different angles of the same moment shot on different days, and so on. In fact the actor in film becomes just another prop, positioned and told to move around for the benefit of the camera, which is always the lead character in a movie.

These fragments are used to create the collage which is what film is and which has decisively and utterly left behind any notion of the authenticity or aura of the one, unique, physical cult object model of the artwork.

Section 10. The film actor’s aura versus ‘personality’

The film industry has replaced the aura of the actor on the stage with the ‘personality’ created by the studio’s publicity machine, where this personality is (quite obviously) a manufactured commodity.

Film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio.

He follows Pirandello’s suggestion that this creates the same sense of alienation from his work as is experienced by the factory worker making an object for the purchase and use by far-distant faceless consumers he will never know.

Up till now film’s destruction of the precious aura of the old-style artwork has been described in several ways. Now, almost casually, he remarks that this destruction has revolutionary implications, that film, as a medium, itself consists of ‘a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art.’

Great, you’d like him to develop this further but no sooner is it stated than he moves on to what feels like a digression, the notion that film studio propaganda promotes the idea that ‘anyone’ can be plucked from the street and become a movie extra or even a movie star.

He compares this opening up of film glory to the masses to something similar in literature. For most of the nineteenth century (the good old days) a handful of writers faced a few thousand readers. Towards the end of the century this changed as the explosion of new magazines and outlets encouraged all kinds of people to try their hand not only at fiction, but essays and commentaries and opinions, published in an ever-proliferating array of specialist outlets. Eventually everyone becomes an expert on something or other which can be published somewhere or other – thus disintegrating the difference between author and reader.

[One hundred years later this is and isn’t true: in 2026 there’s more scope than ever for people to write social media stuff, blogs like this one, fan fiction and so on. And yet a glance at your local bookshops or the newspaper reviews or the supermarket book section proves that there still very much is a thing call Authors, certain names associated with genres or brands, which still command the big contracts from publishers, publicity campaigns, and so on. The death of the author, rather like the death of fiction, and the death of painting, are tired tropes which seem to be repeated in every generation.]

Section 11. The artifice of shooting film

The tremendously inorganic artificiality of shooting a movie. Benjamin nostalgically compares the elaborate technological artificiality of film with the unmediated organic reality of a) the theatre b) painting, which he romanticises.

There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law.

[Benjamin is obviously ignoring the use of collage and montage by his contemporaries the Dadaists, Surrealists, and artists like John Heartfield, because his mental model of art belongs to several centuries earlier, the objects of veneration of the Renaissance, or earlier.]

Section 12.

Here I think Benjamin says that film removes the function of the critic. People can like or do not like a movie under their own steam, without the mediation of a critic, an intellectual.

He makes the point that the mass viewing of art during the nineteenth century was the start of the crisis of art, even before the advent of photography (p.236). [I take all this as indications of Benjamin’s implicit elitism, his opinion that viewing a work of art is a religious act which should be restricted to a handful or just one person at a time.]

[Also it strikes me as historically inaccurate, since most painting up until the Enlightenment was religious in nature and much of it was displayed in churches precisely in order to reach a mass audience, although he directly addresses this point:

In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation.

But I think I take the point that film, as a form, is designed for the masses and therefore easy to enjoy and so collapses the critical function of the expert critic, because everyone is an expert.

With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce.

Section 13. Freud and film

For most of human history nobody paid attention to a slip of the tongue. Since Freud’s ground-breaking book ‘Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, many people now assign a slip of the tongue a profound importance, as an insight into what the speaker is really thinking.

Something similar with film. For the realms of optical and acoustic perception have been transformed by what film can now capture and show us.

Human behaviour on film can be far more minutely analysed than on the stage or in a painting because it captures 25 moments per second with photographic accuracy.

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieux under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.

And:

With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.

Benjamin suggests this has as much scientific interest as artistic, hugely expanding our knowledge of human behaviour and perception.

Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye – if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

When he writes that:

The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal

It made me think of Yoko Ono’s super slow-motion films of matches being struck.

Section 14. Dada

Benjamin asserts, questionably, that art creates demands it can only satisfy later: I think he intends to demonstrate this principle by claiming that the shock tactics of Dada art anticipated the dynamic shock impact of film on the viewer.

So he briefly describes the Dada movement which aimed to subvert every value of art. The Dadaists set out to make their works ‘useless for contemplative immersion’ via a ‘studied degradation of their material.’ He describes various aspects of Dada practice but the one that stands out to me is the phrase I’ve highlighted in this quote:

Before a painting of Arp’s or a poem by August Stramm it is impossible to take time for contemplation and evaluation as one would before a canvas of Derain’s or a poem by Rilke. In the decline of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behaviour…

[Again, sounding the note of bourgeois nostalgia. Also, it’s not true. there is quite as much to contemplate in a Jean Arp painting (0r sculpture) as in a more classical bourgeois painter.]

Anyway, Benjamin then goes on to associate Dada’s shock tactics with the shock experience of film. Both have a dynamic impact.

Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’ The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change.

[This is an accurate enough description of the difference between the autonomy of the visitor to a gallery pondering an artwork at their leisure, or a reader of a book pausing their reading to ponder… and the sensory bombardment of film or TV which sweeps the viewer away on its tsunami of sensation and sentimentality. However, we all know that we’re quite capable of thinking about and assessing a film while we’re watching it. We are not quite as enslaved to the relentless shock tactics of film as Benjamin wants to suggest.]

Section 15. The masses

The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.

He quotes a withering critique of film by French author Georges Duhamel who calls film:

‘a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries… a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence… which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a “star” in Los Angeles.’

This, as Benjamin points out, is actually an old, old lament by intellectuals – that the works of art which they value require concentration and contemplation, whereas movies require a state of stunned submission to the spectacle. Focus versus distraction.

The last part of this last section is a page about architecture, humanity’s oldest art form, insofar as it is perceived by the senses, especially sight. He claims that architecture is most deeply perceived through the habit of living and moving among it. I think he then goes on to say that film is at the vanguard of introducing the masses to new ways of seeing, specifically ‘reception in a state of distraction’ which, he claims, is ‘increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception’. And that this profound change in the way people perceive art and other aspects of the world around them, is epitomised by film.

Epilogue

The theses have presented a thought-provoking, sometimes banal, sometimes impenetrable, sometimes wonderfully insightful tour through a beguiling series of ideas mostly, as you can see, concerning the role of film as the vanguard of sweeping changes in art and society.

The epilogue presents a jarring switch in subject and tone to a very literal and slightly hysterical political rallying cry, with sweeping statements about the rise of mass society and Fascism in Germany, 1935.

Benjamin says society has become a thing of masses, involving the ongoing proletarianisation of the population (as per Marx’s prediction that almost everyone will end up a proletarian). These masses want the relations of property to be reassigned (as in communism) but Fascism, by contrast, seeks to give the masses their expression while retaining capitalist property relations.

He makes a leap into one of his most famous formulations: that Fascism is the application of aesthetics to politics. Fascism dazzles the masses with the spectacle of its displays, rallies, book burnings and so on in order to conceal the fact that exploitative property structures remain completely unchanged. The people are still screwed. But even worse:

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.

It all reads as if someone was holding a gun to Benjamin’s head and forcing him to write agitprop propaganda. It lacks the meandering and civilised tone of most of his essays. Instead he tries to make the point that Fascism is the result of society proving incapable of harnessing disruptive new technologies to peaceful uses. Fascism is, in a sense, the product of technology developing faster than societies know how to harness it. He sounds as if he’s being paid to spout the Leninist line:

The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production-in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets.

Familiar Leninist ideas but buried under the shrill propaganda with which Benjamin, very uncharacteristically, ends this fascinating essay:

Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of ‘human material’, the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

In the last paragraph it rises to a rhetorical climax which feels like it was designed to please the communist editors who published the essay.

Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its 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 politicising art.

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Commentary

It feels like the Marxisant prologue and epilogue have been tacked onto an essay which was about something else entirely. I’ve read the essay twice and I don’t understand how he justifies the last phrase about communism ‘politicising art’. You’ve just read my summary: I don’t think there’s anywhere he comes close to explaining the communist politicising of art.

The phrase seems to have been created as a direct riposte to his earlier phrase about the Nazis aestheticising politics, with their extremely effective leather uniforms and torchlit rallies. This end phrase about communists ‘politicising art’ is clearly designed as the opposite.

But if it’s such a key idea, why didn’t he spend more time on it and make it clear? He spends more time describing what it feels like to be a film actor than explaining what fans claim to be the essay’s main political point.

Two views

You might not be surprised to learn that there is a lot of scholarly disagreement about what the essay is actually saying. Some scholars think Benjamin was a product of his high bourgeois Jewish German upbringing which put an immense value on High Art, that the essay is riddled with nostalgia for that lost world and its values, and that Benjamin he is lamenting its death, the death of the aura, at the hands of mass culture. This is the reading I tend towards, having just read it, closely, twice.

But other scholars take the precisely opposite point of view: they take the scattered and not very worked-out references to the positive aspects of reproduced art, and especially film, combine them with the strident communist rhetoric of the preface and epilogue, and come up with the diametrically opposite reading – that Benjamin was powerfully promoting the death of the aura and authenticity, was praising the exhibition value of artworks, was espousing the shock value of film, and the abolition of aesthetic contemplation as a good thing, as pointing towards a new proletariat aesthetic of the future.

And that, in a way that’s hard to understand, the mass culture and film distraction he describes, were somehow solutions to the political crisis of 1930s Germany and would somehow help the communist cause. I’ve read it twice and I don’t begin to understand how you can read this into it, but it’s a common interpretation. This is the view taken by J.G. Merquior who summarises the essay thus:

Fascism… aimed at making politics into an ‘artistic’ spectacle. By greeting rather than lamenting the demise of the aura, Benjamin wished to reply to the fascist aestheticisation of politics with a full-blooded politicisation of art. The shock aesthetics of film, breaking with the slow tempo of contemplation or reading, as well as with the privacy of the traditional experience of secular art, opened up a new revolutionary path in aesthetic communication…. Mechanical art could thus become a weapon of social liberation. (Western Marxism, 1986, page 124)

Pluses

Aesthetic theory Whichever interpretation you take, you can see how the concept of the aura of a work of art, and the various definitions he gives of it, have contributed to the vast babel of aesthetic theory.

Film theory Similarly with film theory. I don’t know whether Benjamin’s ideas about film were that original, but this relatively short text certainly contains ideas which were to prove influential in the development of film theory.

Absences

About painting he goes on at very great length, and about film at nearly as much length. But what about gramophones? And radio? Google AI tells me that:

Adolf Hitler made extensive use of radio broadcasts, which were central to Nazi propaganda. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels ensured widespread access by producing cheap radios, the Volksempfänger (People’s Receiver), allowing Hitler’s speeches to reach millions of homes, fostering a cult of personality, and broadcasting Nazi ideology.

If Benjamin can go on at such great length about the impact of film, it’s odd that he doesn’t consider the far more politically potent medium of radio. And if he laments the death of authenticity in the mechanical reproduction of art, what about the impact of the mechanical reproduction of music. Once upon a time you had to be present to hear a singer sing or an orchestra play. Then along came the gramophone which brought music into everyone’s homes. I imagine more people brought gramophones to listen to music than bought mechanical reproductions of artworks. Or, to put it another way, reproductions of works of art had actually been around for some time, there had been a thriving market in mass produced prints of artworks throughout the nineteenth century. But the gramophone was something drastically new to the 1920s, as was radio.

But about either of these massive technical and social innovations of the 1920s, Benjamin is utterly silent.

The failure of Marxism

As I’ve pointed out, the prologue and epilogue convey a doctrinaire communist view that the final crisis of capitalist society was unfolding before his eyes. Therefore Benjamin thought that pretty much every cultural product he was writing about (poetry, storytelling, art) was collapsing, expiring, had become impossible etc, in order to fit the preconceived thesis that the general collapse of art was reflecting the great Crisis of Capitalism.

Well, we now know that western capitalism did not expire in a proletarian revolution nor was it swallowed by triumphant Fascism – that once the worst war in human history was over, western capitalism bounced back to eventually triumph over communism, and nowadays, love it or hate it, has successfully persuaded everyone that it seems to be the only way to organise human societies.

Western capitalism is punctuated by periodic crises which nobody knows how to control (2008 financial crash) but always bounces back and now, in 2026, furnishes us with more shiny gadgets and super-mass produced images than Benjamin could possibly have imagined.

The liberation of postmodernism

As a result, we’ve learned to relax about all the issues Benjamin stresses about so much. The great impact of postmodernism in the 1980s was to abandon all those uptight ideas about a Great Tradition and Great Writers and Great Art which we must approach with the reverence of holy relics and high altars. Great White Artists. Great White Male Artists. Great White European or American Male Artists. All those requirements went into the shredder and out of it came vastly more diverse ways of seeing and thinking about art.

The Tradition still exists and many people still love its works, but postmodernism freed us up to like much else as well, to put Hockney swimming pools beside Michelangelo sculptures and like them both, and like Hollywood movies and sneakers and designer handbags as well, in a general continuum of the appreciation of fine and stylish products – and there is no loss.

The evaporation of high seriousness

In other words, the tremendous anxiety and uptightness Benjamin displays about the Work of Art losing its Authenticity can maybe best be analysed as a reflection of the severe crisis experienced by the German haute-bourgeoisie (upper middle-class) of his generation.

Looking back 90 years we can see how he was still soaked in the spirit of late-19th century and early 20th century art movements which were ways of trying to hang on to the devotion and reverence of religious worship by transferring them to objects of high culture. He and Adorno et al were still convinced that there had to be a High Culture or else society was lost.

If you date postmodernism to the 1980s, then for at least forty years we’ve known that the premise of Benjamin’s argument is just not true. Andy Warhol could churn out as many silk screen prints of Marilyn or Elvis as he liked and they’re all great. And their proliferation doesn’t ‘harm’ the Leonardos and Botticellis hanging in the National Gallery in the slightest.

More directly relevant to his case, you can see online and in books and magazines as many reproductions (and cartoons and parodies) of the Great Wave by Hokusai as you like, but when you see it in the flesh (as in the British Museum’s exhibition around it) you are still knocked off your feet. Mechanical reproduction, seeing reproductions via books, magazines, posters, postcards, via the internet, YouTube videos, documentaries and so on and so on, does not vitiate the aura of the original.

The most powerful works of art I know are the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. When you stand in front of one of them, lean forward to examine the brushwork, it is still a mind-blowing experience which no number of reproductions can vitiate.

Advantages of mechanical reproduction…

In fact I take a diametrically opposed view to Benjamin. I see the widespread dissemination of reproductions of lovely works of art as an entirely good thing. It democratises art in at least two distinct ways:

1) It demystifies art. If people who never go to art galleries (probably the large majority) nonetheless see images of van Gogh’s sunflowers or Klimt’s Kiss or the Birth of Venus scattered around in ads and billboards and cartoons and in the background of movies or in prints at Ikea or Habitat, then they come to realise that you don’t need a degree to like this stuff, it isn’t forbidding, it doesn’t require a lifetime of study to appreciate.

And so 2) it just adds to the quality of people’s lives. If Ikea sell thousands of prints of Matisse’s brightly coloured cutouts for people to hang on their living room walls, then that’s an utterly good thing. In fact, surely a good communist like Benjamin should want there to be millions of good quality reproductions of art to be made available to the people. Surely that is improving everyone’s quality of life with beautiful things. Surely restricting art works to just the unspoiled original is about as elitist as you can get.

As to elitism, J.G. Merquior in his 1986 book Western Marxism makes the charge of cultural snobbery and elitism the centrepiece of his critique of the Frankfurt School, claiming that:

Like Lukács and Korsch, and unlike Bloch or Gramsci, most of these Frankfurtian radicals were born and brought up in the (Jewish) upper middle class – and much of their output and outlook reflected a highbrow attitude full of ill-disguised contempt for popular culture of all kinds. (Merquior, 1986, p.113)

Exactly.

…but the value of seeing the original

There very much still is an advantage in seeing an original work of art in the flesh. I’ve reviewed 500 art exhibitions in this blog and in loads of them I’ve highlighted how there’s no replacement for seeing an artwork, especially a painting, in real life.

This is for quite a few reasons which include: you can see the brushstrokes on canvas, you get a tremendous sense of the hand-made artisan effort which went into their making which is, if you like art, quite thrilling. You can see where paint has been applied thickly or thinly, or not at all deliberately leaving bare canvas. You can appreciate its size and scale, whether large or small, which both are ironed out in the homogeneity of online reproductions.

And there is another possible reaction to the actual work – which I read about years ago in an essay replying to Benjamin – which is a sense of awe that a really old work has managed to survive so long in such a destructive world as ours. A sense of reverence in front of the very old such as you also feel in certain buildings (obviously old churches, but sometimes other types too). Reverence not for any Cult value but that something has simply survived all this time.

Disadvantages of reproductions

To reverse the polarity, the strongest argument against ‘mechanical reproductions’ is not they destroy any aura of the original, because they don’t – it’s more that they are all-too-often just poor quality. How many times have I thrilled to the luminous colours in a painting in a gallery and then, decanted into the shop (exhibitions always end in shops), looked excitedly to see if there was a print or postcard of it and… been bitterly disappointed by the reproduction’ complete failure to capture the vibrancy, the luminosity of the original.

The excellent exhibition of the prints of three generations of the Yoshida family at the Dulwich Picture Gallery includes a video explaining that the founder of the dynasty often overlaid up to 30 layers of colour onto his prints, which explains the really haunting, deeply evocative impact of, in particular, his twilight scenes, their amazing delicacy of touch, their shimmering quality. All this was obliterated in the postcards and prints of them, where the most delicate timbres of the original just came over as blue or yellow.

The failure of film

In fact the essay is as much or more about the alienating impact of film as the loss of aura in reproduced paintings. Benjamin repeatedly refers to the ‘the shock effect of film’ which interrupts any attempt at ‘contemplation’ via its ‘constant, sudden changes’ not only of scene and location, but of shots within each individual scene.

Early theorists of film, such as the ones Benjamin quotes, as well as more literary figures such as Virginia Woolf in her essay on film, all describe the same thing, the way film eviscerates the leisurely mood of contemplation which these people obviously felt was essential in front of works of art, replacing it with a hurried, hassled, stressed response to the non-stop sensory bombardment which they experienced as an unprecedented assault.

Woolf’s response to film is entirely negative and so I thought Benjamin’s response was, too, until I read the commentators who assure me he was actually claiming film could become the medium of a new revolutionary aesthetic.

But in the real world surely they were both wrong. A hundred years later films are just films, just another medium which is mostly associated with bubblegum blockbusters and billion-dollar franchises.

My point being that both the early theorists – who hoped film would present a whole new way of seeing the world – and the early antagonists – who thought it would undermine the old traditional ways of seeing — they both turned out to be wrong. The radicals were the most disappointed.

Far from ushering in new ways of seeing and being and helping the proletariat seize power and create a new society, film turned out to be the poster boy of consumer capitalism, epitomising the ‘bread and circuses’ distractions deployed by trillion-dollar American corporations which nowadays sees everyone in the Western world coughing up their subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO and so on, along with the immense and costly apparatus of promotion (from billboards, online ads to TV shows to the huge hoohah about the Oscars) which surround it.

The idea that film, as a medium, has anything remotely ‘revolutionary’ about it now seems quaint and ludicrous.

Benjamin’s notes

Benjamin’s 20-page essay has nine pages of notes attached, all of which are wordy paragraphs in themselves, some a page or so long.

I laughed out loud when I read a long quotation from Aldous Huxley which Benjamin had attached as note 13. What I found funny was the way the inveterately snobbish English novelist summed up in one short sentence what it took the hyper-theoretical German critic 25 densely-argued pages to say. Huxley wrote:

Advances in technology have led to vulgarity.

Benjamin drily comments that Huxley’s ‘mode of observation is clearly not progressive’. But as I have suggested, despite topping and tailing his essay with the trappings of Marx and Popular Front anti-Fascist rhetoric, neither, I think, is Benjamin’s. He offers a very sophisticated, very perceptive and very eloquent analysis of some aspects of the new mass reproduction of art, and the newish medium of film (while, as I’ve pointed out, completely ignoring other just as new modes of artistic reproduction). And he makes a few scattered comments about ow they have destroyed the old bourgeois modes of quiet contemplation of Great Art. And the essay is topped and tailed with quite stridently crude communist propaganda.

But none of this, for me, conceals an attitude which is, at bottom, that of a nostalgic bourgeois belle-lettreist opposed in every fibre of his being to the ghastly technologies of modern mass society.

The great detail with which he describes the negative alienating effects of reproducing artworks and the distracting shock effect of film are far more persuasive than his final attempt to turn things round and persuade you these are good things. That’s the way I read it, anyway. The full text is available online (link below). See what you think.

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Credit

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction exists in three versions. The second version was published in the Frankfurt School journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in February 1936. Benjamin continued to revise the essay down to 1939 and it’s this third revised edition which was published in the German collection of his essays, Illuminations, published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1955. The English translation of the essay, along with the rest of Illuminations, was published in 1968 by Harcourt, Brace and World Inc. It was published in Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1970 with a Fontana paperback edition published in 1973. Page references are to the 1982 Fontana paperback edition. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

Related link

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction online (PDF)
• Illuminations online
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Wikipedia article

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• Illuminations by Walter Benjamin (1955)
  • Franz Kafka on the tenth anniversary of his death by Walter Benjamin (1934)
  • The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin (1936)
  • Max Brod’s book on Kafka and some of my own reflections by Walter Benjamin (1938)
  • Theses on The Philosophy of History Walter Benjamin (1940)
  • Hannah Arendt’s introduction to ‘Illuminations’
• Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno (1951)
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• Aesthetics and Politics 1: Bloch and Lukács
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• Western Marxism by J.G. Merquior (1986)
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