A heart-stricken fact revealed by the author which impressed me a lot is that these days the upheaval in technological reproducibility is eroding the eternity of art works, as well as the eternal values accompanying them, shattering the ground of some common virtues that cherished by people for thousands of years.
In antiquity, art existed in fusion with ritual functions, accentuating their cult value, their existence as an approach to the divine, a justification of the world, the nature, and ourselves. Together with the low reproducibility, many artworks, particularly sculptures, are made uniquely for eternal use, to worship forever, whose value was supposed to pass down generation by generation.
These days in sharp contrast, the surge of technological revolution which brought about inconceivable increment in reproductivity, as well as human being’s ability to “mimic” nature, mimic physical world, mimic the sight of optical eyes through the assistance of apparatus like cameras, has fallen the esteem and appreciation for eternal existence into decay. People nowadays don’t really care the “expiration date” of art, for sake that everything can be recorded accurately and even more precisely than naked eyes, can be duplicated. It is indeed this technological “eternity” in turn rob us of the perception of the spiritual eternity. And what culminates this shift is the emergence of film as a new category of art – a collection of expert-selected, machine-captured meaningless images produced in a capital-intensive industry, which work together to generate implications and metaphors to their already overwhelmed audiences.
Another major difference mentioned by the author which lies between film and other art forms from antiquity is its capacity for future improvement, non-stop, ever-awaiting re-shooting, re-selecting and re-editing. That capacity breaks the ceiling of the “quality” of films, that is to say, we can always produce and reproduce again and again better ones, but still it is indeed this limitless possibility of quality and values blurres the our perception of real quality and values.
The dilemma sent by technological reproducibility has so profound and everlasting influence that it seems like we have already got used to reproduction before we actually gave a solution, or just a slight clue about how to recognize it and how to solve it.
— Shen Ao 3035637424
I enjoy reading your beautifully written response.
The film is “the artwork most capable of improvement” (2008, 28) and “the work of art is produced only by means of montage.” (2008, 29). Technological reproduction has shifted the works of art into being a product of a series of “reproduction of a process” (2008,29), essentially by means of replicating and mimicking which you pointed out.
You also noted that the film give rise to another category of art. To reflect further, are there any other artforms or even art movements that is/are similar to film and photography? For instance, the pop-art movement in the 50s which challenged traditional fine art with popular and mass culture – Andy Warhol with his famous screen-prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell Canned soup – does the art produced also share similarities with film or photography as Benjamin described?