Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura and Authenticity | Ceasefire Magazine

When we ask “what do we do with the art of monstrous men?” we are putting ourselves into a static role—the role of consumer. Passing the problem on to the consumer is how capitalism works.

Amid the mass amnesia sustained by the culture of global capitalism, images have become one of the many depleted and disposable elements that, in their intrinsic archiveability, end up never being discarded, contributing to an ever more congealed and futureless present.

for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print

Spectacle, he writes, is the expropriation of that possibility; it is the production of a one-way communication that he characterizes as “a generalized autism.”

The arts focus gave humanistic theories of creativity a particular ideological shading, for art was traditionally understood as the antidote to the ills of industrial society. The Romantic artist was putatively (if never really actually) outside the realm of capitalist production, and as such represented an exception to modern alienation.