art
"'Fiat ars - pereat mundus,' says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of 'l'art pour l'art.' Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction
as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."
(Epilogue)
"This paragraph has haunted me for twenty-odd years. I have been reading the Artwork essay in a period when politics as spectacle (including the aestheticized spectacle of war) has become a commonplace in our televisual world. Benjamin is saying that sensory alienation lies at the source of the aestheticization of politics, which fascism does not create but merely 'manages' (betreibt). We are to assume that both alienation
and aestheticized politics as the sensual conditions of modernity outlive fascism - and thus so does the enjoyment in viewing our own destruction."
(Susan Buck-Morss, 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered')
"Finally, I would like to return to the writings of Benjamin to indicate the way in which he thought the new technologies of reproduction could be implemented in a politically progressive manner. The essay of Benjamin's in which this topic is discussed most fully is The Author as Producer (1934). In this text, Benjamin argued that social relations are determined by the relations of production, and that therefore the committed artist should attempt to revolutionize those relations. It is not sufficient, according to Benjamin, for an artist to manifest a correct (i.e.left wing) political tendency in his or her work; this has also to be accompanied by a progressive artistic technique and a progressive attitude towards the means of production. In other words, artists should not supply an apparatus of production without simultaneously seeking to change it in the direction of socialism. What artist-intellectuals and factory workers had in common was that both worked and that both were placed within certain relations of production. The way in which artists could best demonstrate solidarity with the proletariat was by means of struggle in that sphere. Benjamin named this process 'functional transformation'.
As a concrete example of what he meant, Benjamin cited the experimental newspapers in the Soviet Union. Pointing out that artistic forms such as the novel were not eternal, he claimed that the newspaper was a modern form which socialist writers could choose to engage. The new Soviet papers, he argued, were being produced jointly by intellectuals and workers, a process via which the distinction between professionals and amateurs, writers and readers, was being broken down."
(John A. Walker, Art in the Age of Mass Media)
What are these new language formations? The author and reader relationship is not fixed and need not reflect authoritarian politics.
"Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer."
(X)
Developments in technology, the essay argues, change the nature of art; this is commonsense. However, to argue that such changes will bring art closer to people and make art less authoritarian in character, that 'new' technologies are inherently more democratic, is rather more contentious.
Changes in technology continue to disrupt the traditional link of authority and authenticity in the artwork and the authoritarian figure of the artist/author. However, the essay stresses the point that changes in technology do not determine a political direction (therefore this argument is not technological-determinist!). There is both a potential to disrupt and reaffirm aura in every aspect of technological change.
This is crucial and demands a politics of art, especially by those who insist on calling themselves artists.