Walter Benjamin’s influential essay “The World of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) deals with the relationship between the mechanization of art production techniques and socio-political changes brought about with capitalistic mode of production. He introduces his essay with a reference to Marxist critique of capitalist mode of production. Assuming a mainstream understanding of base-superstructure relation, Benjamin claims that the prognosis of Marx related to substructure (i.e. economic sphere) has only started to show its effects in superstructure (i.e. cultural domain). With the introduction of lithography, later photography and cinema, the concept of art enters a new stage in which it is not possible to define it with reference to its authenticity and aura and uniqueness. Because the very characteristic of new art introduced by these mechanized modes of art production is its easily reproducibility, making the questions such as which photograph print is the original meaningless. With art’s declaration of independence from ritual, it becomes dependent upon another social practice, it is politics. For Benjamin, fascism makes use of art for art’s sake in a way to alienate people from their social and life content–rather than giving them their rights, fascism creates the illusion of democratic representation of individuals. This can be interpreted as depoliticizing the masses in the age where politics is connected to the aesthetic experience, thus the masses gain aesthetic experience from their destruction as a collective body of individuals who are capable of action to gain their rights and to change the system. Benjamin ends his essay with the rather optimistic sentence, which is hard to find in Frankfurt school, that “Capitalism responds by politicizing art.” And this optimism will later be criticized by Adorno in his letter to Benjamin as being romantic in an anarchic way.
Osip Brik, on the other hand, celebrates this new mechanized mode of producing art works, especially photography. He underlies the ineffectiveness of painting to express and represent the reality when compared to photography, which is cheap, quick and precise. Brik also refers to the importance of photography in socio-political sphere of modern age, to which the painting cannot keep up even the pace to represent it.
Schapiro redefines the limits of what is usually understood with the term “social” to emphasize the necessity of modern art. He claims that as the social is defined narrowly in reference to the lifeless, repressive institutions, the modern art seems to have no social necessity at the first sight. Yet a better way to define the social is to refer to its relation to individual human beings as life forms. The artist as an individual makes choices between possible contents which make her political in Schapiro’s terms; thus the modern art is inseparable from the politics.
Peter Bürger, on the other hand, focuses on the concept of autonomy. Considering Adorno claims, with the increasing autonomy of art, the modern artist takes on a new responsibility of social criticism; Bürger argues that the autonomy of bourgeoisie art is in fact contradictory in itself. Bürger divides art production into three categories as function production and reception all of which corresponds to the sacral, courtly and bourgeoisie art respectively. In bourgeoisie art, the individualization is taken to its limit and the artist creates for an autonomous audience, every individual approaches art individually, not as a collective action as before; this fact makes the function of art is an invalid quest. Then the contradiction occurs when the art for its own sake become functionless. Bürger further exemplifies the negation presented in terms of reception of art by avant-gardeists.
BESTE GÜN ASLAN 