Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
magical, biological ‘aura’ of a work of art cannot be forged,” directly attacked
the democratic politics of mechanical reproduction: “only a brutal utilitarianism
can enslave art to its purposes, making it a means to an end, and thereby reducing
it to ‘art for all.’ . . . There is no universal right to the arts!” 31 Dorner, in contrast,
insisted that reproduction is only one more mode of appropriation of an object,
such as an altarpiece or a family portrait, whose removal to a museum is already
“a violation of [its] original purpose.” He too stressed the political issue at stake:
The enemies of facsimile think of the work only as a unique and sacred
thing; the advocates consider, in addition, the artwork’s uses for the
present. To the former, what is important is the experience of a small
number of individuals; to the latter, the further development of the
people as a whole is equally important. No compromise is possible
between the two. 32
Benjamin’s version of these ideas has the virtue above all of treating the category
“art” as itself having a history, and one continuing to be subject to drastic transformation.
And from his too simplistic acceptance of the Hegelian mythology of
the origin of art in religious cult Benjamin drew a picture of art as the object of a
sort of secular ritual that clearly captures something central to this social practice.
33 Benjamin’s conception can, however, be questioned at several points. To
begin with, the idea that uniqueness is a necessity for ritual images is not well
founded. Leaving aside the evidence from contemporary non-Western peoples,
not to mention cult statuettes mass produced in archaic Europe, one need only
remember the rows of hardly differentiated Madonnas in the Pinacoteca at
Siena to doubt Benjamin’s claim (though this is not to deny that particular
images may, in various traditions, acquire special reputations for efficacy). 34 We
31 K. K. Eberlein, “On the question: original or facsimile reproduction?” in Christopher Philips
(ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1911–1940 (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), p. 148.
32 A. Dorner, “Original and facsimile,” in Phillips, Photography, pp. 152, 154.
33 For a stimulating attempt to work out this idea in some detail, see Carol Duncan and Alan
Wallach, “The universal survey museum,” Art History 3:4 (1980), pp. 441–69.
34 To take an example from India:
During the period of the Pala and Sena kings, from the eighth century till the devastating
Muslim invasions at the end of the twelfth, images of the Buddhist and Hindu
deities were produced in Bihar and Bengal in large numbers . . . Writing about Bengali
Vishnu images found “by the dozens” from the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
Susan Huntington . . . has observed that “it may be surmised that workshops were
given to almost factory-like production of quantities of sculptures following the nowcodified
formulae of both style and iconography.”
Forrest McGill, “Representation and revelation: two Pala images,” in The Real, the
Fake, and the Masterpiece (New York: The Asia Society, 1988), p. 13
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