Page 189 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 189
Transcending Cinema
as the Art of Mass Culture
The efforts of early theoreticians of film like Münsterberg or Arnheim to
“prove” that cinema should be considered as a new form of art against the
snobbish undervaluing of cinema as only a low form of culture or some
kind of non-art, gained an unexpected settlement in Benjamin‘s still con-
troversial essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Dialectics in the Digital Age
Not only regarding the representatives of the old theory of film, but also
some authors, who appeared much later (for instance Béla Balázs, Marcel
Martin, André Bazin, etc.), Benjamin‘s conceptualisation of the industri-
al process of reproduction in the early 1930s turned relations between the
notions of art and cinema around. Instead of “proving” its reputation as
art, film brought up far reaching consequences for the very understanding of
art as such and, above all, it reconfigured the whole field in which aesthet-
ics can operate. In the age of digital media and virtual reality the process,
which Benjamin indicated in the early 1930s, seems to have been accelerat-
ed. The process that I have in mind here involves the overwhelming multi-
plicity of interactions and inter-activities, which differ from, say, pre-me-
chanical and, of course, much more from the pre-digital epoch, by being
decisively powered by technology. However, mass culture as it is defined in
anthropology and sociology as well as even in the so-called science of econ-
omy, still determines the whole framework, in which any practice of art
187
as the Art of Mass Culture
The efforts of early theoreticians of film like Münsterberg or Arnheim to
“prove” that cinema should be considered as a new form of art against the
snobbish undervaluing of cinema as only a low form of culture or some
kind of non-art, gained an unexpected settlement in Benjamin‘s still con-
troversial essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Dialectics in the Digital Age
Not only regarding the representatives of the old theory of film, but also
some authors, who appeared much later (for instance Béla Balázs, Marcel
Martin, André Bazin, etc.), Benjamin‘s conceptualisation of the industri-
al process of reproduction in the early 1930s turned relations between the
notions of art and cinema around. Instead of “proving” its reputation as
art, film brought up far reaching consequences for the very understanding of
art as such and, above all, it reconfigured the whole field in which aesthet-
ics can operate. In the age of digital media and virtual reality the process,
which Benjamin indicated in the early 1930s, seems to have been accelerat-
ed. The process that I have in mind here involves the overwhelming multi-
plicity of interactions and inter-activities, which differ from, say, pre-me-
chanical and, of course, much more from the pre-digital epoch, by being
decisively powered by technology. However, mass culture as it is defined in
anthropology and sociology as well as even in the so-called science of econ-
omy, still determines the whole framework, in which any practice of art
187
