Mechanically reproduced art
Mechanically reproduced art
Or why the printing press was a bad idea
In ancient times, before the frogs were gay, all art was made by human hands. Sometimes tools were involved, sometimes it was sung or recited instead of formed by literal hands, but every piece of art—every object, every performance—had a person’s effort behind it. The carvings on a monument were more mystifying, and are still more mystifying, because they had been painstakingly done over weeks or months. An event with music and dancing was worth attending because for most people, there was no music at home.
Then in 1440 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, setting in motion a chain of important and controversial events. Mass literacy, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, all of them point back to him. Most of the time people didn’t use the printing press to print capital-A art, but sometimes they did, and as result literature and poetry became art forms that could populate the earth without the effort of any copyist monk. For accessibility, this was unquestionably good—it meant that the masses, not just the monarchs, could afford to read a few books. It was even good for authors, who suddenly had an audience to write for. When etching and engraving were invented a little later the masses could see illustrations, too, and eventually the photograph was invented and put in all kinds of print media as well. This was just as big of a turning point as the printing press, at least in art history. It marked when every piece of extant physical art—the paintings, the portraits, the statues, the masks, the steles, the ceramics, the monuments, the fetishes, the arms, the armor, the manuscripts, the miniatures, the jewelry, the architecture, everything—could be flattened and reproduced ad infinitum for the average person to enjoy.
A picture isn’t the real thing, of course, but though we don’t give it much thought, the flatness and differences in color or resolution are only the surface level differences between an object and its reproduction. One of the central tenets of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a 1935 essay by Walter Benjamin, is that mechanically reproduced art is devoid of the “aura” of the original object, its authenticity as an object that has been passed down through generations. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” he says. The aura of a physical object is the vertigo-inducing awareness of the time and craftsmanship that went into it and the hands it has passed through. It’s the feeling of being close to an object that is truly one of a kind.
Now we have gone a step beyond the photograph, and music, drama, film and performance are all as easily reproducible as a page of type. Like type, not only are they reproducible, they’re cheap: for less than the cost of a Cheesecake Factory dinner I can listen (for a month) to almost every song ever recorded. I can listen to the field recordings of Alan Lomax as easily as the latest Pooh Shiesty. If I wanted to I could stream the Criterion Collection for an equally low price. Even before the internet, CDs and VHSs were cheap compared to food and rent; a coffee table book with high quality prints of the world’s greatest paintings was and still is $40 new, a few dollars used. Decades ago there was an enormous amount of cheap art in the world, more than could ever be seen or appreciated, and in the last decade that amount has gotten orders of magnitude larger.
On paper this is obviously a good thing—we should be more entertained, more inspired, more knowledgable about Caravaggio. There should be artists alive today who without exposure to certain formative works would’ve been insurance salesmen instead, and probably there are. Despite the free and easy art, though, I want to go out on a limb and say there isn’t much more of a twinkle in our collective eye than there was before. We haven’t been liberated from our worse instincts, despite having unlimited access to the work of the masters. There is still drug abuse and workplace absenteeism, despite Hamilton streaming on Disney+.
Why haven’t we learned to love each other? There’s a lot to say about the difference between art and entertainment or the commercialization of art, but suffice it to say there is art getting made today that’s as good as the old art was. I think what’s different is that mechanically reproduced art has replaced our consumption of original art. Only as a ratio, maybe, if the average person today listens to more live music than the average medieval peasant. But the shows that average person watches, the music they listen to at home, the books they hopefully read, all are reproductions. The modern experience of art is completely aura-less.
This is not really news; there’s no attempt to hide it. Hugh Kenner wrote an interesting book called The Counterfeiters that talks about a lot of things, Buster Keaton, player pianos, the horse-ness of a horse and the man-ness of a man, but the only thing I remember is his definition of what counterfeiting really is. If a real and a counterfeit $100 bill are physically identical—indistinguishable by the best expert, perhaps even produced by the same machines, one owned by the mob, the other by the Treasury—what’s different about them? That one was produced by the Treasury, and the other pretends to be. The only thing being counterfeited is the object’s origin. The physical details are only a means to make that origin more convincing.
The origin of mechanically reproduced art, though, is not being counterfeited at all. We know what we have is a copy—Walter Benjamin points out that if you manually reproduce art, you’ve committed the crime of forgery, but mechanically reproducing it is fine (or at worst copyright infringement) because everyone knows it’s a copy—and so we experience it like one, and sometimes treat it like one too. We’ve grown so used to not experiencing the aura of art that it overwhelms us when we do.
What is the consequence of all this auralessness, I don’t really know. I do know that I follow art accounts on Instagram, see works that I’m immediately impacted by, then scroll past with a vague sense of needing to be somewhere. I’ve seen albums released, been excited to listen to them, then never done it out of knowing that there’s no rush, they’ll still be there tomorrow. Mechanically reproduced art should mean that we need less artists, less content—the very best can be seen by everyone. Yet the content business is booming, and Netflix originals are not the very best.
There are other weird situations, ones that would not have happened when art was expensive. It is an eerie experience to walk around a CVS while a meaningful, soulful song—something like I Want You Back by the Jackson 5—is playing on the radio. Drug stores should be allowed to play royalty-free instrumental tracks, nothing else. There’s a gas station chain on the East Coast that plays classical music outside, but not inside, the store—the greatest works of Brahms, Mozart, Vivaldi—to keep people from loitering.
We complain that when we watch a movie with company, 4 out of 5 people end up on their phones, but we always blame that on the phones instead of asking what it might say about the movie itself. Imagine if instead of watching a digital version in your living room, you were watching the celluloid original in a movie theatre. Somewhere behind your head, light shining through it, was the only copy of that film in existence. You would inevitably think about being only two degrees of separation away from the light that fell on the actual scene. Perhaps that sense of mystery would more strongly incentivize you to watch.
There has always been some degree of mass production of art; in Athens there were workshops that cranked out black figure pottery, in his introduction Walter Benjamin pointed out that woodcuts came before the printing press. But we have to acknowledge the way we experience art is very different today from how it once was, and we treat the art differently as a result. I wonder if that thought would give comfort to someone who feels disenchanted with art, who skips through hundreds of songs on Spotify without feeling any of the old magic—that they’re not disenchanted with art, they’re disenchanted with copies.
What should we do about all these copies, then—how can we win back our love of art. We can’t, probably. You don’t get Avengers movies without mechanical reproduction, and Avengers movies are what the people want. But I do have one last thing to say, to the person who sneers at the thought of being nostalgic for a solitary, poor, nasty and brutish time before on-demand television and the printed word. If mechanically reproduced art did not exist, yes, I would be one of the peasants that only got to hear music two times a year. But those two times would be awfully memorable.
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