Response to Walter Benjamin by Alexis, Ramy, and Sean

The texts talk, very elaborately, about how mechanical reproduction changes the meaning of art. It begins by telling us how an original piece of art is authentic, and what makes it authentic is it's relevance for it's time and it's process through time and how that process give it it's authority. This authenticity is regarded to come from ritual, it's original use value relevant only to the context and time in which it was created. A copy, however, does not hold this ritualistic value. Quite the opposite, it is discarded of a valuable context and of the process that an authentic piece would go through; it looses it's aura. By loosing it's aura it stops becoming a piece of private contemplation and becomes a piece of a political message. This transformation of purpose, from ritualistic to political, is pushed along extremely efficiently through the advent mechanical reproduction which also brings about new art forms such as photography and film. The text ends up with a comparison of art in communism and fascism how these governmental bodies affect art and it's value(ritualistic vs political).

The discussion of this text was fairly odd, we did not feel the author take a solid stand yet we understood the points he was traveling across. His only arguable arguments come either at the very beginning, in the preface, or at the very end, in the epilogue. His stands are so subtle that the text is read largely in a "this is how it is" context. It is only at the very last 2 sentences that we found a final stance taken by Benjamin. It took an insight into communism and fascism to understand what his point was. First, it's important to understand that fascism works by unifying a country and claiming it's superiority over all else, it encourages class structures by pushing a type of super corporate attitude in all who live under it, and most importantly, it uses a lot of propaganda. Communism on the other hand is the opposite in several ways, gearing towards removing class structures and etc and yet, still using art to it's own political ends. So what Benjamin comes to say is that Fascism uses the authority of art to propagate a message, while Communism does so by politicizing art. Both of which are the controlled reproduction and distribution to control political discourse.

With a super communication structure like the internet, reproduction, or more appropriately, DISTRIBUTION, is the name of the game. Keeping this in mind, we think it's important to question the relevance of reproduction, since it is so common, and how that effects the control of political discourse; who has it(the control)? and how relevant is it(the art)?