Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
It is evident from the notes Benjamin made for his projected Passagen-Werk
that he was deeply influenced, in his appreciation of photography, by Baudelaire’s
critique of the new medium and his assertion that “poetry and progress
are two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and
when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.” 54 When
Benjamin calls the photographic reproduction of artworks “a phase in the fight
between photography and painting,” itself “a moment in the conflict between
art and technology,” 55 he is following the poet who was no doubt the greatest art
critic of the nineteenth century. But Baudelaire’s opinion here reflects his historical
limitations, showing his attachment to Romanticism and its stress on the
transfigurative activity of the imagination as the basis of art; less than a decade
later the Impressionists were to embody a radically different attitude to the data
of perception in their work, and count photography an ally not an enemy.
It is obviously true that photographic reproduction decreases our distance
from artworks by removing them, in image form, from the special settings (museums,
palaces, etc.) in which the originals sit, and by even placing them at our
disposal for use on mementoes, greeting cards, and wrapping paper. But it is
hardly certain that this has spelled the withering of the “aura” of the work of art,
any more than the commercial distribution of religious chromos implied a
decline in faith. It has even been plausibly argued that the circulation of reproductions
has enhanced the “auratic” presence of the originals, by preparing the
viewer for the experience of the artwork, by embodying the limits of reproduction
and so the uniqueness and unreproducible properties of the original,
and—last but hardly least—by being the basis of “a new form of class distinction,”
the difference between “those who own originals as opposed to those who
own only reproductions.” 56
More broadly, we might ask, if Benjamin’s analysis is correct, how are we to
explain the remarkable flourishing of the art scene, with its galleries, collectors,
journals, and museums—in which photography itself, along with the cinema that
Benjamin celebrated as art’s greatest antagonist, has its secure niche? “Aura”
seems to have more than survived the effects of reproduction and the development
of mechanized image making. Here, as ever, however, we must examine
the reality of this appearance.
54 C. Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859,” in Art in Paris, 1841–1862, ed. and tr. Jonathan Mayne
(Oxford: Phaidon, 1965), p. 154. This passage was quoted twice by Benjamin in his notes, at
Y10a,1 and Y11,1 (W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (tr.) Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 691).
55 W. Benjamin, Arcades, Y1a,3 (p. 673) and Y2a,6 (p. 675).
56 Remy G. Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984),
p. 174.
101