The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin Great Ideas)

Within major historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of being of the human collective, there are also changes in the manner of its sense perception.

The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears.

In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again.

In the hands of the Dadaists the work of art, from being a sight that seduced the eye or a sound that persuaded the ear, became a bullet. It flew towards the viewer, striking him down.

The here and now of the original constitute the abstract idea of its genuineness.

With photography, in the process of pictorial reproduction the hand was for the first time relieved of the principal artistic responsibilities, which henceforth lay with the eye alone as it peered into the lens. Since the eye perceives faster than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was so enormously speeded up that it was able