Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
explains, he means “unapproachability.” 21 Object and viewer are not connected
in the spatio-temporal framework of action; instead the object appears as outside
of time, a given, unalterable. In an essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin speaks of
objects with “aura” as returning the gaze of the viewer; such objects have been
invested with human characteristics. Put less poetically, “experience of the aura
. . . rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the
relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man.” 22
This experience, according to Benjamin, depends on certain social circumstances,
those which he associates with “tradition.” While Benjamin’s use of this
concept derives from the Romantic contrast of the culture of a lost organic totality
with that of fragmented modernity, he emphasizes the slowly developing
modes of production and accordingly stable modes of perception and consciousness
characteristic of “traditional” society. The heart of “tradition” is repetition (in
mode of production, in the rhythms of daily or yearly life), and the most developed
form of repetition is ritual. In this way Benjamin finds the origin of art in the
religious life of premodern society. The dissolution of earlier society brings with it
“the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual” and the transmutation
of the “cult value” of their products into the “exhibition value” of what is now
seen as autonomous art. 23 That this alteration should allow the transmission of
the property of “aura” is, in Benjamin’s view, profoundly related to the uniqueness
of the art object, which he believed essential to its original ritual function.
Benjamin’s claim seems to be that “aura” depends on two factors: the presence of
a tradition, a relatively stable framework of experience, in which an object is
“embedded”; and, across tradition, the continuous existence of the object as a
unique physical entity. 24
In the modern world, tradition as such has been decisively disrupted by
the advent of capitalism, with its basis in industrial mass production. Since
“the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode
of existence,” 25 the breakdown of earlier patterns of activity brings with
it a transformation of visual experience. In his essay on Eduard Fuchs, the pioneer
historian of “popular” imagery, Benjamin quoted approvingly Fuchs’s
statement that “every age has its own quite special techniques of reproduction.
21 Benjamin, “Work of art,” p. 243 n. 5.
22 Benjamin, “Some Motifs of Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, p. 188.
23 Benjamin, “Work of art,” p 225.
24 Ibid., p. 223:
The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric
of tradition. The tradition itself is . . . extremely changeable. An ancient statue of
Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks . . . than
with the clerics of the Middle Ages . . . Both of them, however, were equally confronted
with its uniqueness, that is, its aura.
25 Ibid., p. 222.
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