In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin describes a significant departure in the function of art around 1900. His essay is ultimately a theory of art that can overcome fascism. Benjamin writes, "the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech." The speed of speech was accelerated hundreds of years before the speed of art in its mechanical reproduction age. Speech was mass produced and distributed with the invention of the printing press. The printing press provided the world with quick and uniform dissemination of knowledge which could inform, motivate, and ultimately congregate huge groups of people with newly acquired power, who would be otherwise powerless and exploited by those in power.
As result, society can be revolutionized at a rate faster than ever before. Fliers, pamphlets, manifestos, dripping with the voices of the oppressed and filtered through a handful of talented writers-- ripped through history like wild fires, destroying ancient regimes and replacing them with an upgrade. Texts such as Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, The United States Declaration of Independence by America's Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, The Communist Manifesto by Marx/Engels, The King James Bible etc. have brought about irrevocable change in society that will continue to ripple through the minds of generations. Every single person born into a society that offers training in literacy will shape an understanding of the world through the filters of each author lucky enough to distribute a work on the massive scale.
If a newly informed individual discovers the concept of oppression and can identify with this word, when that very special solar eclipse comes around again, she or he may choose to lead colleges towards yet another vision of a brave new world. Every wave of feminism, each cultural soldier armed with the red book, every proponent of civil rights, each and every revolutionary in history can thank the medium of literature and the mode of print or for the liberation of Jane and John (and the translations of Jane and John in X number of languages all over the world).
Mechanical reproduction and distribution of another creative medium has a place somewhere in the heart of a volatile society. For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. Every rise of a new regime creates a new kind of oppression and a new population of the oppressed.
Exposure to visual art is instantaneous. Everyone knows what the Mona Lisa looks like but only a tiny percentage of us have made the pilgrimage to the Louvre. Mona Lisa's umbilical cord has been cut by this new age of mechanical preproduction because the painting can no longer rely on its context for meaning. Before mechanical reproducibility of art connoisseurs experience art which has a definite aura. Benjamin calls it the "unique phenomenon of distance however close it may be." The work is distant to a spectator looking at the painting through bullet proof glass because it is a relic of a distant society. After its reproduction, the context is further away and the art is left naked in a sense, vulnerable to the spectator's interpretation. Mona Lisa herself is smug to some and forlorn to others. Maybe she is part of a grand conspiracy. Maybe she's a refrigerator magnet. The masses can make what they choose of art conceptually and physically. "Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself."
Originality seems to be under threat as more and more copies are made, the harder it is to find the original since its copies have given society an excuse to endowed the original with so much more value. It is rare because there are thousands or millions of not so rares. The higher value is set for the original, the cheaper the copies.
However, Benjamin makes the point that art created after mechanical reproducibility would anticipate reproduction upon conception which would still leave possibilities for the germination of critical masses. "Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." Diego Rivera's mural Detroit Industry relies on aura in the ritualistic sense. We get a vague understanding of his depictions of industry and capitalism when we look at postcard with Detroit Industry printed on the front. However, the sheer grandeur of the original mural moves us in a way a reproduction could not. We are in the corridor of the DIA, in Detroit, Michigan where Fordism all started. Our besotted eyes take in the bright colors, metaphysical symbolism, and historical references as we slowly piece together an overarching story about this place and time, however we choose to spin it. We feel engulfed by the art; by its size, floor to ceiling, telling us this story of industrialization and exploitation.
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