A Critical Reading of Walter Benjamin´s The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Abstract

My intent is to offer a critical report of Walter Benjamin’s most celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Many difficulties arise from a first reading of the text, notably because of a striking contrast between its shortness and the large number of issues raised. The reasons for that lie on the circumstances in which the essay was written, but may also be related to the philosopher’s epigrammatic style. This latter topic could alone be a theme for a paper and I cannot provide a fair account of the problem here. Instead, I will emphasize three aspects of Benjamin’s essay: 1) the context in which it was produced, in an attempt to show that it can be seen as a kind of manifesto; 2) the development of the key-concept of “aura”, already mentioned in an earlier text (“On Some Motifs of Baudelaire”); 3) the question of “politicization of art”, as it appears in the epilogue.