screen cultures

In his essay , Benjamin is mostly concerned with the authenticity of an object , especially - the authenticity of a work of art . Authenticity is key because it is the measure of both the history and the life ' of the object and of our understanding of it . He shows the notion of authenticity through a number of terms , the most important of which are aura , reproduction , tradition , cut value and exhibition value . Benjamin argues that in the modern world the work of art is quickly losing its authenticity , personal history , and tries to make up

for it with reproducibility

A traditional work of visual art has something of a life of its own , a presence one can feel . It is made up especially by the object 's personal history , by its continuous existence in various spatial and temporal frames . The Japanese greatly value this kind of aura : it is when an object is extremely old , when you can feel the passage of time just by looking at it , then it is at its most valuable . In a sense , this is true not only for the Eastern world , but until the latest few revolutions in reproducibility (as Benjamin notices , there were several of them , the most recent being lithograph and film . He did not live to see computers , the Western world also valued this aura . It still does , but less

A part of this aura is the history of the object as defined not by its physical history , but by its context within tradition . As Benjamin aptly notices , this is a place which changes freely with the tradition itself a Greek statue had one value to the Greeks , a very different value in the Christian Middle Ages , changed yet again But when a work of art is placed within a cultural context , it gets additional value . Reading Umberto Eco 's books is very demonstrative in this respect : when one is familiar with the epoch he is depicting : they become much more enjoyable for the fact of recognition . This traditional value pulls at the strings which make up our cultural baggage , and , in a sense , which make up ourselves . Well-placed references can strengthen the impression - and thus , the aura of a work of art - a thousandfold

In the age of reproducibility , Benjamin argues , the aura of an object dissipates . By making many identical copies , the effort to see and understand the original is no longer as great , and thus the feedback from the interaction with the object is not nearly so great . This diffuses the effect , makes it pervasive and all-encompassing , but very much lesser than a concentrated impression . Also , Benjamin notes interestingly that an aesthetization of everything leads to Fascism because it returns us to a mythological world view by giving a cult value to everything rather than to separate objects of art

Cult value is when an object of art is created not because of cultural possibilities in the widest sense of the word , but for practical purposes of another sense . A...