The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction After Ninety Years. An Essay

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The purpose of this essay is a reassessment of a problem posed almost 90 years ago, but which marked the modernism and postmodernism of the 20th and later the 21st centuries and which is still current. The aesthetic and historical research was carried out mainly through the prism of the art installation, the main element of my PhD thesis. This essay includes a critique of Walter Benjamin’ Marxist approach – in the system versus outside the system and the attempt of finding explanations of sociological and cultural phenomena under an ideological paradigm. The approach through the prism of Marxist ideology I consider it narrows the perspective of the problem addressed in ‚The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’2. The dissemination of art through mechanical reproduction actually follows a law of the market and which, applied in the cultural field, involves increasing the target group and decreasing the level of value. Its implementation had produced a cultural mutation. The exception is made by cinematography, which appeared and evolved precisely from the modality of mechanical reproduction. The avant-garde promotes a destructuring tendency by challenging old artistic forms. This tendency of exceeding the limits was consonant with the atmosphere of radicalism and intolerance present in the interwar society, it led to the emergence and antagonism of ideological systems, culminating in the outbreak of the Second World War. The idea of mechanical reproduction of the work of art began simultaneously with the culture of mass production. The mechanical reproduction of the work of art later turned into digital reproduction, with a much increased degree of accessibility, and the mutual mirroring between the mode of production and culture was to rise to another level, that of artificial intelligence.