The Enlightened Virtuoso: Benjamin - The Reception of Art as either Cultic or Exhibitionistic

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Benjamin - The Reception of Art as either Cultic or Exhibitionistic

"With the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase."

"In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It falls back to a last entrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait is central to early photography. In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent loved ones, the cult value of the image finds its last refuge. In the fleeting expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the last time."

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 257-258.

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Welcome! This blog started off as a personal project meant more for myself than anyone else. In that regard, it has served as a catalog for the resources I tend to enjoy. However, recent circumstances have changed the way I have utilized this medium. For a while I began using it as a public journal, following the example of my personal journal. While it may seem strange, I use my journals as a record of intellectual exposure and growth rather than mediums of creative outpouring. I often post quotes that I have found particularly meaningful. For me, this is a way of documenting what I have been exposed to and how my own thinking has developed. In that sense, my journaling is perhaps a bit unusual. It works for me though and I hope that it may be of interest to you as well.

To some extent, this journal is an experiment with Siegfried Kracauer's note that, "We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on us. We are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes that make up daily life" (Die Angestellten, in Schriften, vol. 1, 252). This blog is obviously public, yet it's not really created for anyone other than myself. If you find something that's of use or value, all the better! It does, after all, serve as one of my research resources and it may serve that purpose for you as well.

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