The Modern Turn of Art: an Analysis of Benjamin’s “the Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction

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The Modern Turn of Art: An Analysis of Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction” The study to which Benjamin called attention to in letters to Gretel Adorno and Max Horkerheimer in October 1935 emphasized great importance to one of his most controversial, if not the most significant, piece of writing: “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction”. Its issue, he wrote to Horkerheimer, was to locate the precise place in the present to which his construction of history in the work the Parisian arcades will refer to as its vanishing point: If the pretext for the book is the fate of art in the nineteenth century, this fate has something to say to us only because it is contained in the ticking of a clock whose striking of the hour has just reached our ears. What I mean by that is that art’s fateful hour has struck and I have captured its signature in a series of preliminary reflections titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduction.”[1] The theme of the writing is the fate of art in the age of technological reproduction. But why does Benjamin think that “art’s fateful hour has struck”? What exactly does ‘the age of technological reproducibility’ mean to art? Benjamin goes through these questions referring to a constellation of concepts like ‘aura’, ‘authenticity’ which eventually drives to the area of mass and politics. Although Benjamin’s intention might be throw a new conception of art under the new age, the writing has more confound meaning of what new technology especially the technology of reproducibility has brought changes to other aspects of society. In the end, Benjamin gives a discussion of Fascism Aesthetic and war and it seems strange that he jumped from art to war. But taking the whole background into consideration, it makes good sense that Benjamin ends his essay in this way. This

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