Walter Benjamin on Mass Media

Two years after Hitler seized power, German art critic Walter Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a short but highly influential essay pondering how photographic reproduction challenges the aura of uniqueness that suffuses original artworks. A committed socialist, Benjamin didn’t think this was necessarily a bad thing, since a truly mass medium lends itself to mass participation. In the essay’s final section, Benjamin turns to the politics of mass art, distinguishing between the tendency of Fascists to aestheticize politics and the project of Communists to politicize aesthetics. Benjamin’s essay feels especially resonant today, in the era of the internet and digital photography, when everyone carries a camera in their pocket and where images posted online spread virally.

Benjamin’s essay is short, but dense, so I’m drawing on this YouTube explainer. If you want to read the original, you can find a translation of it here.