I think we cannot look at the problem from a single angle.
Walter Benjamin said in the article: captions become obligatory. From the perspective of art authors, adding captions to make it a mandatory requirement can express the author’s ideas more simply and clearly, so that these ideas can be accurately conveyed to the audience. From the perspective of the audience, captions can be used as a reference, but they do not necessarily follow the guidelines of captions to understand the work. As Shakespeare’s famous saying: “There are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand people’s eyes.”
I also think that the author’s views on technology and art in the article are somewhat one-sided. Here I would like to mention a different point of view from the author. The use of technology to replicate artworks can promote the popularization of artworks and make them more concerned, understood and loved. For example, during the epidemic, visiting museums in person is not possible in some places. Many museums, such as the Palace Museum in Beijing, used VR technology to recreate artworks, which received wide acclaim.
Zhang Ziye（3035771397）
I could not agree more with your point that “the problem” is multifaceted and has different angles to it. I would say Benjamin clearly don’t think it is, too! He begins by pointing out one of the expectations to capitalism in the future: “… the basic conditions of capitalist production … not only an increasing harsh exploitation of the proletariat but, ultimately, the creation of conditions which would make it possible for capitalism to abolish itself” (p.19). What do you think the main problem Benjamin is trying to address in this article?
Benjamin uses captions as one of the examples of how artworks could be interpreted, particularly in photography. It would be constructive to read Benjamin’s take on captions within the context of a narrative building. One of Benjamin’s argument toward the end of the article was “[Q]uantity has been transformed into quality: the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a different kind of participation” (p.39). See what happens in social media nowadays, where an exact same photograph can be read (or captioned) in a completely opposite way, providing a totally different story, and polarise the masses.