Certified Copy, Certainly

By Manuel A. Melendez

When I return to the Museo del Prado this summer and gaze once more at Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, I will think of Walter Benjamin. His seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” is as frustrating as it is a necessary document in the study of all text: art, film, or literature. Benjamin’s thesis pivots on three questions: how artistic production is affected by machinery and industry, what this technology does to the authenticity of a work of art, and from where art in an industrial, machine-led world derives its value. In asking these questions and proposing his responses to the reader, Benjamin is illuminating the intuitive shift that occurs when technology advances enough to spotlight the speed and reproducibility of work – in this case, artwork, and how it simultaneously becomes positioned for use through politics as a tool for propagating fascist propaganda.

For Benjamin, the conflict in his essay is born in the inspection of the aura in a work of art, derived from its place and time, “the unique quality… giving it a special status equivalent to that of a sacred object in religious ritual,” and entirely absent in a reproduction (Leitch 975). Art is put into a perpetual state of deterioration in its reproduction because the receiver of the art can no longer seize the where and when in which it was created. The form in which one engages with art thus changes incontrovertibly for Benjamin with the advent of technology. In the wake of the aura’s absence, the democratization of art is enabled, making it widely available and viewable to the masses, which causes a further devaluation of that art—each reproduction destroying more of the original’s authenticity and reducing it to a commodity. Not only that, but Benjamin furthers his argument by suggesting the reproducibility of art, especially through the lens of cinema, transforms art itself and its reception into a passive, distracted vehicle for the masses, where the creator cannot be seen as the originator of their art or even their sole interpreter, and where the audience and the masses become active acknowledgers of its power (995). Indeed, as Leitch notes, Benjamin maintains that “the very process through which a movie is constructed… prevents audience members from unconsciously empathizing or identifying… provoking them to thought and perhaps to action” (975).

And yet, in that excerpt, Leitch also reveals a crucial paradox in Benjamin’s argument: how can mass art like film induce passive participation but still unlock the possibility of collaboration between the audience and the artists—is it possible to be passive as a viewer or receiver of text on any canvas? Benjamin attempts to decipher this through his proposal of the two planes in which art is received and then valued, the cult value and the exhibition value. He  considers how film lacks the former, making it an ideal platform for what he calls the aestheticization of politics, or, the manipulation of the masses by fascist regimes through a purported exchange of spectacle that acts as freedom of expression but that does not grant the people any rights. Within that framework, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1934), might well be the polestar of Benjamin’s reasoning for writing his essay in the first place, an immaculate vessel for fascism to discover “the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology” (996).

Per Benjamin’s definition of aura, a reproduced version of art eliminates its uniqueness by altering its place and time from an origin point. Its authority and authenticity are gone––a ruler that has been removed from its kingdom. Or, as Benjamin puts it, “[t]he whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and, of course, not only technological—reproducibility” (978). Earlier on in the essay, though, Benjamin announces that “the work of art has always been reproducible” before delving into an analysis of film and its lens, the “most powerful agent” at the crux of the processes that separate the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition and allow it to be actualized in the recipient’s own situation (977-979). If art has always been reproducible, what is the problem at the heart of Benjamin’s essay, and with cinema specifically? Nazis.

Benjamin’s rightful paranoia in the face of Nazi Germany’s meteoric rise to prominence and power is understandable, but his essay muddles his own urgency in the very manner he uses to explicate his preoccupation with the future of artwork across its various platforms. Limiting the critique to film, Benjamin notes, “[t]he social significance of film…in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in cultural heritage,” but it reads as an attempt to entrench art in an unequivocal point of origin that also serves as an artifact of its cultural inheritance (979). If art is mobile, public, and able to be copied, there is no longer a value on where it may be viewed or experienced privately or away from others. As Benjamin writes, “[i]n photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts” (983). Furthermore, he divulges earlier on, “as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceased to be applied…the whole social function of art is revolutionized…it is based on a different practice: politics” (982). Benjamin’s assumptions falter as soon as he focuses on what most alarms him: the diffusion of art to the masses versus to an audience.

Here, Benjamin seems to contradict himself, stating how “actions shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view” and yet countering this statement later on by calling film the “true training ground” in distracted reception (991, 994). He seems to cover himself by noting how “the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a different kind of participation” but what is Benjamin trying to uncover (993)? What he is acknowledging, and then passing off as real change, is that the actual throngs of people that cinema attracts (masses), countered with the relative few that pass through museums to absorb the artwork on its walls (audience), is the primer for how “technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the masses to art” and that the “simultaneous collective reception” that is emblematic of the cinema hinders true audience involvement in part due to the “shock effects” film produces—keeping the audience alert to their own evaluating attitudes but requiring no attention, in essence, allowing the masses to “absorb” the work of art into themselves and therefore cease to be a genuine audience (989-990, 994).

Additionally, Benjamin’s insistence on the authenticity of art and its value being based on tradition and its “unique existence in a particular place” shows a disregard for his own indistinct  stance on the value of art outside its aura. How can this very aura, so tied to the historical context in which the art was made, suddenly lose its context when it becomes a political tool? Politics is tied firmly to the same contextual tethers, history, ritual, and tradition, that Benjamin believes are gone once artwork becomes reproducible and democratized—it is as much of that tapestry as the aura itself; not only that, but defining any quality in art or text via a subjective stance and then attempting to construct an ostensibly objective argument for that stance is unproductive, especially once it becomes clear that Benjamin’s fear of the loss of the objet d’art’s authentic power is, actually, his fear of art losing its autonomy and thus enabling the possibility of its use in politics.

This entire aspect of Benjamin’s argument hinges on his own biased perception of art appreciation, and frankly, an elitist undertone that blinds him to the fact that distracted reception is not a product of a camera lens. All art is subject to groupthink—what drives Benjamin to his overreaction is his dread of political persuasion having found a perfect vessel in popular entertainment and his terror of fascist ideals arresting the masses through the emulative prowess of film and its uncanny ability to aestheticize politics, which, for Benjamin, leads to “one point…war…an uprising on the part of technology” (995-996). 

Benjamin was exiled to Paris after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 and committed suicide at the border of the Pyrenees in 1940, fearful that he would be returned to France and then sent to a concentration camp (Leitch 974), but his unfortunate death does not alter the reactionary conflation of Nazism to the mass appreciation of art, especially film. Earlier in his essay, Benjamin admits “[j]ust as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes…so too does their mode of perception,” and outside of his understood anxiety over Nazi Germany’s rise during the time he wrote the essay, it could very well be that Benjamin would have seen technological reproducibility as a tremendous advantage to all art-text and the collective experience of it (980). But as written, Benjamin’s essay offers no evidence to support his warning against the dangers of reproducible art (and thus, mass-produced art) that is not fervently tied to his most personal horror of living as a Jewish man during the time of Hitler.

Nevertheless, the essay remains eminently valuable for literary study despite its ambivalence towards inevitable technological futures, furnishing a framework for understanding the impact of technology on the production and reception of all art. In fact, one could affirm the legacy of Benjamin’s writing on technological reproducibility’s effects on art by the state of digital technology today—fashioning not only the manner one comprehensively takes in literature, but how it and other arts have been disseminated in the wake of the digitalization of writing and art, especially across platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, the latter particularly illustrative of Benjamin’s own concerns about the loss of aura and cohesion when encountering art for the first time. Indeed, can there be a first time for any art when it is already copied and eternally tied to the data webs that make up the Internet? What’s more, is there even a way to separate the digital from the text in this century? All this without even mentioning the advent of ChatGPT, the A.I. chatbot amassing an imposing and overwhelming knowledge brain that possesses no authorship, no aura, and no cult value: quite succinctly, ChatGPT is the embodiment of pure exhibition value. It might well be, were Benjamin alive today, his living nightmare—the worst possible outcome in the face of technological reproducibility as he saw it in 1935, the influence of Nazi propaganda on the masses aside.

Still, by recognizing that an audience is not passive, and often makes itself a participant in the creative process, collective or otherwise, Benjamin's essay shines a light on the crucialness of audience engagement and reception in the text allotted to literature, film or art. Benjamin’s essay still heeds technology’s capabilities where art’s accessibility to a wider audience is concerned: countless e-books, online platforms, and audio books (and countless more waiting to be e-published) expand the reach of text in ways Benjamin could not conceive. Is it not a comfort that technology and the digital age have made it easier to preserve works of art across all contexts and for a more diverse and inclusionary audience than during Benjamin’s time? Should I not make it to the Museo del Prado to gaze at Goya, its presence there still holds only a fragment of its value, thanks to technological reproducibility. Digitally speaking, The Third of May 1808 is everywhere, disseminated and appraised perpetually. It is better this way: the ultimate form an artwork or art-text can take in the inevitable face of a political world—to be present always, for everyone, all at once, and without delay, certainly even if only as certified copy.

Works Cited

Goya, Francisco. The Third of May 1808. 1814, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Leitch, Vincent B., et al. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” Leitch. pp. 975-995

Riefenstahl, Leni, director. Triumph of the Will. UFA, 1934.