AD603 Critical Theory

Reading through Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, I found myself attempting to his wherewithal as much as I was attempting to gain an understanding of his perspective.  Here’s a guy who in Angela McRobbie’s words “occupied an ambivalent place in cultural studies”, and Simon During (her editor) adds that Benjamin “came to have almost no audience”… but he’s important enough that 68 years after his death his work is still being reprinted and considered worthy of inclusion in a Critical Thinking class in well respected university. Despite the number of areas one could take issue with Benjamin; use of faulty syllogism which at times appears to have wrapped itself around a linguistic axle, use of broad general statements about concepts that by nature have multiple forms and manifestations (like the effects on Art of technological reproducibility for instance), and his somewhat luddite reaction to new processes (particularly film), in his efforts to address technological reproduction’s effect on Art, Benjamin has called attention to creation and dynamics of mass culture (which may include art), the relevance of which increases with the effects of globalization.  

For me intention is the key, both in deciding what might be valuable from what Walter Benjamin has to say, and in considering Art and the effects of technological reproduction.  While the definition of art may be elusive and the lines between art, business and culture are definitely becoming more blurred, it is helpful to maintain the distinction between artistic, business and political objectives or intentions. The products of Hollywood for example fall on a 3 dimensional spectrum with varying degrees of influence from art (expression), business (profit), and politics — the position of any given work of “art” varies accordingly. Blanket statements about the artistic value, authenticity or worthiness of films without considering these as separate issues is problematic. 

I think if we concentrate on Benjamin’s major observations we can give him some slack regarding his difficulty constructing sound logical arguments.  I also think we need to take into consideration the likely influence of what for him were relatively recent effects of the Great Depression and, perhaps forgive the slight resistance to change regarding new technologies and processes he may have exhibited, particularly concerning film making, and learn from his insights, despite the danger of giving to much value to the premises that were presented to support these ideas, which may have been faulty or misguided. It is not clear to me that the social significance of film necessarily results in a cost to cultural tradition, or that the social function of art ever was founded on ritual, or that without the criterion of authenticity applied to artistic production that the social function becomes politics, but his major insights are worth paying attention to.  Technological reproduction makes art available to the masses, with good and bad effects. The mass culture that results is in part facilitated by technology and controlled by capitalist concerns. Benjamin’s awareness of the potential for social control through control of the culture industry may be obvious today but somewhat prescient for his time.  Likewise, the observation that art or individuals possess an “aura” that may originate from structures of power is important, regardless if I buy into Benjamin’s point of view that technological reproduction may shatter this aura (it may enhance it).

Interestingly, Benjamin’s Passen-Werk project relied less on linguistics and more on imagery. For some insight into Benjamin’s Passen-Werk and thoughts on how truth could be derived from collage or fragmented images, see;  https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/3.2.html

and, The Arcades project: http://www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/Passagenwerk.php

For those interested, Susan Buck-Morss presents a possible assembly of the Passen-Werk project in her book: The Dialectics of Seeing (1991)

 Gordan Matta-Clark’s work was mentioned by Dan Graham as being a good example of how one can cut away and reveal the just-past, cutting into architectural structures

(Photo: Courtesy of the estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/David Zwirner [3] )

Splitting (1974)
Matta-Clark may be best known for his “building cuts,” in which he sliced structures like loaves of bread. This house in Englewood, New Jersey, was split in two, over four months of jacking and tilting. Manfred Hecht, who helped out, said, “It was always exciting working with Gordon—there was always a good chance of getting killed.” The house’s corners are now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but the rest is gone— it had been chosen because it was slated for demolition anyhow.

Day’s End (1975)
Matta-Clark cut five openings into the decrepit shed of Pier 52, calling it a “basilica” with a “rose window” (a bean-shaped hole facing the sunset) and illuminating a spot known for seedy nocturnal misbehavior. It was all done illegally—he later said, “I had no faith in any kind of permission … there has never, in New York City’s history, with maybe one or two minor exceptions, ever been any permission granted to an artist on a large scale”—and once the city got wind of the project, Matta-Clark ended up leaving the country to avoid arrest. (The pier today is a flat slab, with no superstructure.)

 [from: http://pintocurrent.blogspot.com/2007/03/gordan-matta-clark.html  and http://nymag.com/arts/arts/all/features/27799/index3.html ]

After having played in two seminal punk bands in Bogotá since I was 13, in 2000 I decided to quit playing for numerous reasons. What attracted me to punk in the first place, its openness, variability and the element of surprise, just wasn’t there anymore. What started as an open invitation to kids from all parts of the city to escape the scheme of the Colombian culture of alcohol-tropical music-dance had become a way more rigid, boring and exhausted structure. I had to get out.

My intention to keep “making” music remained intact, and even clearer, knowing exactly what I didn’t wanted to do: I didn’t want to have anything to do with rock and roll, no band interaction, and complete control of the creation process. So, since I don’t know anything about music, I decided to turn to my computer for my “backing band”, using synthetic sounds as a response to the bare-boned “honesty” of rock, and to be able to create dance beats. Dance, as a function of music, became my obsession. Sadly, I realized that you do have to know some music basics in order to write music in a computer (even with the drag-and-drop logic of today), so I just took the easiest road and started copying other people’s compositions. I would grab a riff from the Sex Pistols and a chorus from 90’s dance sensation Technotronic and put them together on a different tempo, with different instruments, as my backing track to sing my lyrics along. I became really prolific, covering and recovering old songs from my record vault. I recorded an EP and released IT under my own label as NOFUTURO.

I never saw the idea of using these instrumental tracks as a tribute but more as a resource, a marketing technique for product placement. People who listened to the songs immediately were hooked because some of those tunes were already embedded in their heads, but most people couldn’t tell what the originals were. This dynamic became my vehicle to express my ideas about music, production, distribution, and even politics. By the time I had to perform live, I started masking myself, and just sung and dance. My vast list of presentations includes house parties, two art galleries and one rock venue from where I got booed out. Some people yelled “anyone can do that!” “Where is the band?” some where just insulted that I was using their oh-so-beloved cultural gems to sing my lyrics. Apart from the “fan” comments posted on my website, that were limited to appreciate the danceablity of my tunes, the hate comments focused on the issue of originality, authenticity and reproduction. It stroke me, since that was exactly the point I was trying to make, the mere fact that the project was called NOFUTURO (no future) was proof of that. The use of the computer, the no-band presentation, the use of dance music was a representation of the broken cultural state of my context, and of course, of me.

Authenticity and originality, for me, are dinosauric concepts. The Sex Pistols and The Ramones were doing nothing more than regurgitating Chuck Berry riffs, selling their versions of bluesy-chord guitar rock, Nirvana was just a 90’s version of Cheap Trick or The Knack, but when you remind that to an angry, time-encapsuled, violent audience, you are at risk of being booed, or even physically attacked.

The “aura” is just a burgouise construction for marketing art. The self-considered “high art” or “authentic art” exceeds Kitsch or Pop in its exaggerated cheesiness because of its nonsensical intention to designate transcend-spiritual powers to human life (in these case, the one of the “artist”), like predict the future, capture the feelings of a collectivity, and more.

It is curious, but one idea that the average cultural consumer uses to avoid its sad condition consists in considering him/herself “special”, “different from the others” or “one of a kind”. These pseudo aristocratic concepts (that have their origin in the idea of “exclusive” inserted by marketing to sell products of a supposed better quality, and thereby, more expensive) appear more useful as daily lubricants before a perspective of a life which infinite mediocrity its impossible for us to digest in dry.

DOWNLOAD AND LISTEN TO NOFUTURO HERE AND HERE

Technological reproducibility

From Walter Benjamin’s explanation, the development of mass culture and modern art is based on the technology reproducibility, which has already been controlling the culture industry and also has changed our understanding of art totally different from the past. Even the unique existence no longer lies in the reproduction, the art itself, or the existence of art is still there, no matter how many reproductions will be produced.

Human beings today are getting used to the work of art by technological reproducibility, we wear the same style of clothes, we listen to the same pop music, we enjoy the same films and also we are all producing the same products. There was once an extremely crazy period that public treated those individuals who wore different, who spoke different, who thought in different ways, monster. People went mad at that time because of the freshness of the technological reproducibility and what they were thinking at that time was, people should be all the same since it was the fashion. And that in return promoted to the development of the culture industry.

What Walter Benjamin is discussing in the book is that with technological reproducibility, art and the work has escaped from the chain of the tradition, which indicates that art should be the prerogative for nobility and the value of art mainly depends on its unique existence. Everyone can enjoy the art and can also possess the art as his or her own by buying the duplicates. And the reproduction of art, as I understand, bring new life to the art, which keeps the art work alive for long and also provides the possibility of art education in public.

Mass culture or the culture industry is mainly set up by the foundation of technological reproducibility, posters, films, music, fashion, and also what I am doing now, design, the industrial design. Art and culture now is not isolated from business and industry any longer, they are now part of the business or we can say they are the soul supporting the entire industry. Unlike other forms of modern art, films and photography are brand new, which means they are not the direct results of traditional art. Personally, I enjoy photography a lot and strongly agree with what Walter Benjamin said, “To photograph a painting is one kind of reproduction, but to photograph an action performed in a film studio is another. In the first case, what is reproduces is a work of art, while the act of producing it is not. The cameraman’s performance with the lens no more creates an artwork than a conductor’s with the baton; at most, it creates an artistic performance.” Films, photographs and painting, they are totally different forms of art presentations. Films are a combination of reality and art sublimation while the other two are more concentrated on reality. Well, design is also different from all these three, which is more commercial and practical. Walter Benjamin did not talk too much about design but in my opinion, design should be the best representative of technological reproducibility, especially in today. Most of the designs, no matter what kinds, are thrown out according to the plan or special needs for commercial cases in business in order to produce in large amount. Designs sometimes are produced for production with no other purposes while films or music still has structures, literatures or other art-liked stuffs in side. Design, sometimes, from my understanding, is the outsider from art as the result of technological reproducibility, though it has certain connection with art and culture, the nuclear of design projects is to make money on the behalf or art and beauty. Films and photographs still express some critical sounds or describe something while today’s designs seldom do.  

I guess I have clear understand of technological reproducibility after reading but now I feel lost after thinking and writing. I have no ideas why it happens. Maybe that is what Walter Benjamin expected.

 Walter Benjamin stated that due to reproducibility, the authenticity of an art work is lost.  As a photographer, reproducibility and authenticity have been important issues. They should also be important for those working in other mediums as well, since, in the digital age, everything is subject to reproduction.  However, I couldn’t figure out if Benjamin was stressing reproducibility as an individual act (I use a camera, a mechanical object, to create an artwork), or reproducibility of an artwork (I photograph art work for magazines, posters, etc.).

In either case, I believe there is an authenticity, an original that maintains the “aura” in technical reproduction because reproduction is a degenerative process.  But this is controlled by the artist/gallery/museum/other that owns the artwork.  These are the ones who define and protect its authenticity, but sometimes this is not accomplished very well.  For example, Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother, provides a good debate for the age of technical reproduction.  Lange, a photographer employed by the Farm Security Administration during the late 1930s, photographed the living conditions of farm families in the west.  Migrant Mother has since become an icon, appropriated in many different contexts.  And, since the federal government owns all of Lange’s negatives from the FSA project, her photographs are public domain.  Prints are easy to order and anyone can use the image to their liking: “There are no known restrictions for the use of Lange’s Migrant Mother”, Library of Congress [http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html].  Besides authenticity, another problem with reproducibility is context.  Photographs can easily be collaged with other images, and captions can be removed and replaced. Below is an example of Migrant Mother with one example of appropriation that was printed in a Black Panther publication during the 1970s. The drawing raised concerned about the original context of Lange’s photograph.

I found similarities between Benjamin’s essay and Adorno’s essay on Culture Industry.  Both theorists discuss film and the masses.  In comparison, Adorno was much more critical than Benjamin, but both implied that film has become the problem with art.  While Adorno stated that film is a part of conformity encouraged by the culture industry, Benjamin stated that film fulfills the demand for a distraction from reality.  The masses want a distraction; they want to participate in a type of hyper reality that only film can create.  I once learned this idea about the differences between painting (traditional art) and photography: Painting is a construction from reality, while photography is an extraction from reality.  I can now add Benjamin’s idea: Film is an intervention of reality.  Like photographs, film also extracts from reality, but, unlike photographs, film chooses specific parts of reality to edit and create a new reality: the hyper reality that the masses seek as a distraction.

Dan Graham’s essay didn’t shed much light on Benjamin’s essay, except to state a few of Benjamin’s ideals: history as memory, the capitalist myth of progress, and the just past. What I really understood in Graham’s essay was artist Gordon Matta-Clark. I hadn’t heard of him since this reading, but, after looking up some information about him and his artwork, he is someone that I’ll remember in the future. I really enjoyed his work. He sees homes, apartments, factories, and other buildings as commodities, and he literally cuts into the walls and floors of these buildings as a way to release the structure from a commodity function.

I would strongly have to disagree with Walter Benjamin and say that film has in fact realized its true purpose and potential as a form of art, regardless of its emergence during the technological era of reproducibility. The evolution of art’s form from “unique” to “mass production” is simply a result of the evolution of our modes of perception.  It’s the distinctive purpose of the form of art, as addressed by the artist, which independently categorizes itself into a group that determines its right (or lack there of) to be mass produced.

Film’s intention is to be mass produced.

It is argued that film is not exclusive art due to the fact that it is edited and reconstructed to establish a desired message.  A painter approaches his canvas in the same manner, by concealing the initial process of the end product.  Why then is a painting considered to be a unique form of art, while a film is merely mass produced art?  The problem stems from our misunderstanding of the artist’s intention and is further developed with society’s exploitation of the main objective.

Kuwait does a fine job of exploiting the arts, particularly the art of film.

The entertainment sector in Kuwait is administered by conservative, reactionary and sometimes even illiterate government censors.  A government run conglomerate filters and edits the entertainment broadcasted throughout Kuwait in an attempt to protect the country from “provocative” western influence. It must be noted that most of these men who have been appointed to censor DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH and edit based on imagery.  I’ll try to paint a picture of the extent of censorship enforced upon our society…

I remember watching The Sixth Sense and not knowing that Bruce Willis was a ghost because the scene with the naked shooter was completely cut out.  In ANTZ the last kiss between the two animated characters was removed because it exhibited public display of affection.  Memoirs of Geisha was never even released because the censorship board decided the Geisha profession was a form of prostitution.  You get the point.  This kind of regulatory action is very frustrating for a fast developing and western influenced nation, hence the emergence of the black market of bootlegs, which quickly grew to accommodate the nation’s hunger for entertainment (in its purest form).

With bootlegs came another form of film manipulation.  Copies were being made in other languages, altering the meaning and intent of the film.  The authenticity of the artwork in its original form, as prescribed by the artist, was being jeopardized - not through interpretation but rather manipulation.

This same type of manipulation is practiced in other forms of art as well. Reproductions whose setting, size and function are altered for a personal purpose can have a large impact on the audience’s interpretation of the form of art.  The solution is pretty easy: it is up to the artist to decide how, when and where their art should be displayed, whether mass produced or not.

And just for fun, a picture of “reproduction” at its best:

At the Louvre in Paris, France

Benjamin regards mass-culture as progressive while Adorno criticizes it. To flip a mass culture was a challenge after reading Adorno. I felt that Benjamin was like less-critical thinker or positive critical thinker as his writing was descriptive and comparative rather than offensive to certain theory or opinion.Though there were many sections to define and analyze, my eyes focused on  “aura-uniqueness” and “destruction of aura.” 

In the ancient days, art served a crucial role as means of religion and also it signified creativity, genius, eternity, and secret and so on. Art was an object of worship or adoration. After Renaissance, art involved in human and secular beauty but it still was an object of admiration. Only at “the place” where art work exist, to be specific, in a cathedral and a museum or in a nobleman’s living room, its quality was valued high. The artwork was talked with the authority and tradition of its owner, too. It was valid only when the time and the place fitted.That is, art was limited by time and place as well as their social level. For the masses, art was just far from themselves and out of sight.

Benjamin says, photograph liberated  art from its limited function with a certain social levels. Differently from the first stage of photograph as portrait, the aura-unique existence in particular place(p.21)- was destructed by its Technological Reproducibility. 

Then, what did the work of art which escaped from aura do for the masses? It gave them democratic opportunities which enables them to approach, own, talk, and share. So the destruction of aura brought pop art. The reproducibility changed the function of art, that means, art became an object of entertainment and no longer an object of worship.

In this sense, Benjamin also mentioned film that could accommodate the masses at the same time. Basically it was a social function of film. The masses could enjoy this entertainment which films gave through mobilizing tactile and auditory sense as well as optical sense. 

Benjamin pointed that politics is the fundamental of the practice of art. He strongly insisted the forfeit of aura with regarding the films of Nazism and fascism because those films agitated and restricted the masses. He opposed to the politicized art that hid political violence and did not solve the core problems of conflict and possession and uncritically mobilized and agitated. Simply he wanted art to be familiar to the masses.

Besides Benjamin’s notion, here I want to add more about aura. I think that the aura also comes from the copies of the original, for example, some people could decide to be a painter after they were inspired by printed pictures of Van Gogh. Also Benjamin can say that not all original art works always have aura with them. Aesthetic composition takes an crucial role though he said concentration of mind is important. I guess that is why Greeks applied the golden rule to Venus. All in all, it is difficult to carry out   cognition very well.

Also I think aura is something that is positive, not-broken and should not be broken. The mystic side of aura could be used for politics, or fascism, it was exactly applied to Germany, but it is not always like that situation. In addition, I think art cannot be completely combined with politics though art had political power.

Here are 2 photograph-like works of Hyunggu Kang in the exhibition titled “Gaze”

Experience the aura!

lalla83200706111746381.jpg 

lalla83200706111746381.jpg

Film is designed for reproducibility.  A packaged recording (VHS, DVD, AVI) of film contains watered-down authenticity.  What started as an original visual idea has gone through several interpretations and been edited into a montage.  That montage is eventually packaged and reproduced for mass comsumption.  The montage is the only way that the film  can exist.

I’m not entirely sure how animation fits in.  It also starts as an original visual idea that is then interpreted by a number of people, edited together, reproduced, packaged, and consumed.  For this response I created a bootleg of a scene from and episode of The Simpsons.  Does my homemade version have more authenticity than the one released by the studio?  Does it mean anything that one person created it, as opposed to an entire crew?

SIMPSONS BOOTLEG best pork chops

In contrast to film, a song is a complete abstract creation.  A single recording of a song (which is usually seen as the song itself) is reproduced and packaged much in the same manner that films are.  However, films require reproduction in order to exist.

To me, Walter Benjamin - in opposition to Adorno - seems to justify the importance of mass culture, and film in particular.  Mass culture, through reproduction, can permeate throughout society.  It can “mobilize the masses”.  That’s a source of power, be it good or bad.  The Dan Graham article describes Benjamin as demonstrating that “mass culture possessed a latent revolutionary power”.

SOME PROGRESSIVE ROCK —- “produce a sense of eternal newness”

I am writing this in the house where my grandmother has just died, my stylish grandmother, my grandmother who always wanted everything just so, my grandmother who worked for years in the fabric department of Marshall Fields in downtown Chicago, and sent us boxes of trimming and fabric when I was young up on the mountain. We are all here: my folks, my cousins, all the great grandkids, my aunt and uncle, and my Grandad.

But not my Grandma.

Then someone finds it-her old yearbook from 1939-there she is –so young! So much younger than I can imagine-but it is her, picture after picture-her smile just so, her hair in the most fantastic rolls and curls, all gleaming, her blouses trim and neat, her eyes just the same as always.

She looks just like me. (Dan Graham, are you listening?) My cousin notices and it is true-my gramma looked like me before I ever did. We  pass the book around, around, and around.  We bring all we remember of her to the photos, we talk about her, we create an aura of layers of memory and history that now resides in the photos-

But it’s still not like having her here, so happy for the ruckus of children and family.

I know W.B. wrote of a work of art, but I think the allegory holds.

For some things there can be no replica.

Benjamin talks about the destruction of the aura through mechanical reproduction, and what a good and right thing this is, but I don’t agree completely. The idea that nothing valuable is lost when uniqueness is lost is intrinsically false, for the state of uniqueness itself is lost. It is not simply transferred to multiplicity, which shows but one facet of the original.

There is not just a loss of aura, but of substance, and history (which I know he touches on) and of all the idiosyncrasies and nuances that David Smith wrote of when he described all the ways an apple can be.

If it doesn’t matter that the reproduction becomes something other than the original, that it creates its own meaning and response, than have at it. But those remarkable convergences of place and opportunity and substance that bring forth a unique thing- keep away from it. I like its aura, so back off.

I had planned to write about the reversal-of-aura-accumulation-process that happens in art, for example in Anselm Kiefer’s work, when he uses reproduced bits of text and endless series of photographs in his paintings as part of his inclusion of the empirical on the way to the higher order-as Adorno would say-and thus imbuing these reproductions with aura, though not the exact aura that was destroyed in the act of reproduction. This brings up the idea of the transmutation of aura, and the possibility that aura, like all matter, is neither created nor destroyed but just shifts about in form-which I think has happened in his much lauded world of film, where the actors, originally stripped of aura when faced with the camera, now throw around more aura (thanks to the culture industry) than all the thespians in Britain.

But when I sat down, after this long, long, long day, and I thought of how much we all brought to the photos of my Grandma, and how they still fall so short of her in her splendidness, I felt this example served well to make my point.

And there is no internet here, but if there were, I would link back to last week, when this house felt as it should, and my grandparents would be scooting off in their golf cart for their evening jaunt through the woods, and none of us would need to hunt through boxes for old photographs.

Walter Benjamin’s work was more contemporary to the situations we encounter today in film and in the reproduction of art.  “Art has always been reproducible.”  Humans can copy each other and get the same end result or something close to it.  I felt as though Benjamin was mostly trying to educate and make us think about the effects of the reproducibility of art and made great comparisons to “art” and film.  It begins by explaining what is lacking in a reproduction, “its unique existence in a particular place.”  It was very clear to understand the importance that the art work has to the particular time it was created.  In reproducing and art work you loose that essence.  I appreciated his discussion of film and the differences in art (painting specifically) and film and the analogies used to compare them.  It helped make his point clear and understandable.  I have my own perceptions of film but do not have any in depth study into that industry.  Benjamin helped me realize some of the perceptions and ideas in this industry.  Mostly I was intrigued with the idea of reproducing artworks and the effect it had on the culture industry and how it relates to my profession. 

Reproducing art works has created a major feature that can reach students in the educational environment.  When art works were first reproduced it was a way to expose the masses to “fine art”.  It was also instrumental in the development of the picture study movement in art education in the late 1800’s and into the early 1900’s.  This movement involved the infusion of reproductions of art into everyday life specifically the classroom and to the homes of the masses.  It was also thought that if the masses were exposed to art they would be more refined and desire to become better human beings.   Art was also thought to lift the moral character of the masses.  During this movement it was thought that if “culture” was brought into the classroom the child would then bring this culture to the parents causing a change in the character of the masses in America.   Expose the masses to fine art and we are going to create a better mass industry.

As an art educator, reproductions of art are essential to my teaching.  I understand the point of view that Benjamin takes and how art looses its essence when reproduced.  Any reproductions that help me achieve my goal, educating about all aspects of art, are important to my curriculum.  I must have reproductions in exchange for being able to have access to famous works of art.  Any exposure to art works, art history, and aesthetics creates a well-rounded experience for the students that I encounter.  Personal experience has also taught me that after viewing reproductions and then encountering the original makes that experience even more awe-inspiring.  When you can view a painting, building, sculpture, or other art work in its original context it makes that experience remarkable. 

Film also affects the range of accessibility of information in the classroom.  Benjamin points out how film dissects reality (in his comparison of surgeon and magician) and brings a new reality out of this dissection.  This is also an immense way to get information across to students.  Many educators use not just documentaries but pop culture films (age appropriate) to teach.  One example in social studies is to use films to teach of a particular historical era.   This dissection of reality pieces together events perhaps in a somewhat biased way but it can be a tool to pass information about an industries perception of an event or time period.    

Benjamin makes a good point about how films unite the masses in a common reaction at a common time.  This is something that eludes art.  Perhaps this is not necessarily a good thing.  Going back to Adorno and his work where we become unconscious thinkers and consumers.  Therefore, art may be the one thing where it is ok to have an uncommon opinion or to gain different reactions to the same piece at different times or through viewing the actual work or a reproduction.  Is the goal of the film industry to create a mass reaction to the piece it is viewing?  It is hard to tell if Benjamin is making a statement for or against something but it seems as though he is making the reader aware of the roles that films verses art has on  the culture indusrty.

Reproduction in art and film does take some of the reality out of the film or art work.  The end result is to touch the masses and expose more people to film and art.  In doing so we can escape from the reality that is our life or we can be forced to question what our reality is.   We can also use reproductions and films as a tool to teach.  This changes the function of film and art.  We, as individual thinkers, have the ability to determine the use of these medias and how we will benefit most from them.

 The cover of this handsome New York Review Books paperback is a detail from “The Autumn of Central Paris (After Walter Benjamin)”, a 1973 painting by R. B. Kitaj.   This image is from the website:  bad.eserver.org/reviews/2005/scholem.htm