Walter Benjamin on Mass-Produced Art Analytical Essay by Top Papers

The paper explores Walter Benjamin's, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and specifically look at how digital cinema may be interpreted as a classic instance of technology democratizing the creative and artistic process, and as an instance of how technology can de-fetishize artifacts. The paper discusses how the camera in general is a tool that, given its mediated state, can become exploited to the full by those with political objectives in mind. Lastly, the paper looks at the redemptive aspects of modern mass-produced art (especially art as captured on film) and at how art can be used to "fine-tune" the "human apparatus of perception" - even as modern art is faced with distracted masses. The paper shows how the age of mass-produced and mass-replicated art is an age that offers much that is promising, much that is redemptive, but also some genuinely troubling challenges, as well.