So in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Benjamin argues that through replication and proliferation of art an interesting phenomenon happens to the original: it loses it's aura. Now, Benjamin thinks this is okay, because that aura of originality had profound class implications. The rich had access to the original and not until you could replicate art, could the "masses" (pardon the term) have culture.
Benjamin is interested in what happens to the artwork from a Marxist perspective. I'm not. I'm interesting in what happens to the piece of art from a phenomenological perspective.
And so when I was recently walking around MOMA in New York I came to the room that had the original Starry Night - easily the most overproduced work of art in the history of art. Staring at it, I did not feel any overwhelming sense of anything - mostly I felt numb and slightly annoyed. I had seen too many copies of the painting and hence the original could not work me over, could not affect me. Now to be fair, art museams are weird, crowded, sensationally overloading places, so one can have all kinds of strange moments in a museam for non-Benjaminian reasons.
If Starry Night is the most overproduced work of art, Dali's melting clocks might be second. Seeing that piece of art was an even weirder experience because it turns out, to my surprise, it's really small. At some point in my life I started making the unconscious assumption that artworks were all poster-sized; the simulacrum has won.
Haha. I'm kind of a Benjamin obsessive so I appreciate your comments here. I wanted to point out, though, that Benjamin's position in the art work essay with respect to the disappearance of the aura is highly ambivalent. You can see that he wants to make the avant garde Marxist argument - and he does in the end - but he writes so rhapsodically about the aura that it's hard to believe he's totally convinced. In fact, his position with regard to art is more often phenomenological than vulgar Marxist - though "phenomenological" in the generic sense of taking consciousness as one's field of inquiry, i.e. not in the more systematic sense of Husserl or Heideggar. You might enjoy his essay "Some Motifs on Baudelaire" in which he describes the shock experience of navigating crowds and its affect on auratic perception. I see a correlation there with your own experience of navigating the crowded, over-stimulating museum.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments. I have to admit I don't know Benjamin very well and haven't read much outside of the essay I'm obviously referring to. I've got a collection of essays by him that I think has the Baudelaire essay. I'll check it out.
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