Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction eschews on the significance of art, comparing and contrasting art’s origins to its more current perception.  new technologies has enabled art to transcend its original association with the religious, secularized and the magical, breaking down what Benjamin deems art’s “aura,” so rather than art as a single experience only available to a select few, through new means of reproduction (and in particular film), it is available to the public at large, enabling politics and culture to collide in a way that was never before possible.

of course to say that art and politics and culture never had the symbiotic relationship that it does now would not be entirely correct.  throughout history, many cultural revolutions were started by the likes of more traditional artists: picasso, mondrian, and duchamp.  the latter’s association with the Dadaist revolution however, is linked closely with film’s anti-elitist, anti-aesthete qualities.  film, like many of the Dadaists’, highlighted the idiosyncrasies of mankind and destroyed many of the traditional relationships that separated the artist from audience.  what technology has enabled within art in its dissemination of form, is the promotion of a “mass culture” and a “mass politic.”  the mystique is broken.  the original artwork no longer matters, but the idea of its existence, for whose significance is more apparent and more important than the actual work.

I think here too however of Jean Baudrillard’s essay Simulacra and Simulation, which expounds on the dangers of perceived reproductions of reality.  Baudrillard writes, “the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none.  The simulacrum is true.”  We now live in a world where modern society has replaced reality with symbols and signs and that our experiences are now just a simulation of reality rather than reality itself.  i think it is important here to make a distinction between simulations of reality versus reproductions of reality, the latter being a direct representation of our existence, the former being a mere perversion which distorts society rather than enhances society.