Download or read book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction An Influential Essay of Cultural Criticism The History and Theory of Art Hardcover written by Walter Benjamin and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-08-24 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin discusses whether art is diminished by the modern culture of mass replication, arriving at the conclusion that the aura or soul of an artwork is indeed removed by duplication. In an essay critical of modern fashion and manufacture, Benjamin decries how new technology affects art. The notion of fine arts is threatened by an absence of scarcity; an affair which diminishes the authenticity and essence of the artist's work. Though the process of art replication dates to classical antiquity, only the modern era allows for a mass quantity of prints or mass production. Given that the unique aura of an artist's work, and the reaction it provokes in those who see it, is diminished, Benjamin posits that artwork is much more political in significance. The style of modern propaganda, of the use of art for the purpose of generating raw emotion or arousing belief, is likely to become more prevalent versus the old-fashioned production of simpler beauty or meaning in a cultural or religious context.
Download or read book Illuminations written by Walter Benjamin and published by HMH. This book was released on 1968-10-23 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays and reflections from one of the twentieth century’s most original cultural critics, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode; and his theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and introduces them with a classic essay about Benjamin’s life in a dark historical era. Leon Wieseltier’s preface explores Benjamin’s continued relevance for our times. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.
Download or read book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Walter Benjamin and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is an essay by German cultural critic Walter Benjamin that has been influential across the humanities, especially in the fields of cultural studies, media theory, architectural theory, and art history. Walter Benjamin wrote the work in an effort to describe a theory of art that would be useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art. He argued that, in the absence of any traditional, ritualistic value, art in the age of mechanical reproduction would inherently be based on the practice of politics. Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Walter Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. In addition, Walter Benjamin's work has also influenced politics & social sciences, politics & government, ideologies & doctrines, communism & socialism, and arts & photography.
Download or read book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Walter Benjamin and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-08-07 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeatedly – and what the troubling social and political implications of this are. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves – and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives – and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
Download or read book The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media written by Walter Benjamin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-31 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and Art written by Andrew Benjamin and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-02-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin's most famous and influential essay remains The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art is the first book to provide a broad and dedicated analysis of this canonical work and its effect upon core contemporary concerns in the visual arts, aesthetics and the history of philosophy. The book is structured around three distinct areas: the extension of Benjamin's work; the question of historical connection; the importance of the essay in the development of criticism of both the visual arts and literature. Contributors to the volume include major Benjamin commentators, whose work has very much defined the reception of the essay, and leading philosophers, historians and aesthetician, whose approaches open up new areas of interest and relevance.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory written by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of theory in the 21st century. With chapters written by the world's leading scholars in their field, this book explores the latest thinking in traditional schools such as feminist, Marxist, historicist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial criticism and new areas of research in ecocriticism, biopolitics, affect studies, posthumanism, materialism, and many other fields. In addition, the book includes a substantial A-to-Z compendium of key words and important thinkers in contemporary theory, making this an essential resource for scholars of literary and cultural theory at all levels.
Download or read book An Analysis of Walter Benjamin s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Rachele Dini and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-02-21 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction combats traditional art criticism’s treatment of artworks as fixed, unchanging mystical objects. For Walter Benjamin, the consequences of addressing a work of art in this manner have a wider resonance: closed off from any active visual or tactile engagement, the work of art becomes an object of passive contemplation and a potential tool of oppression. Benjamin argues that technology has fundamentally altered the way art is experienced. Potentially open to interpretation and accessible to many, art in the age of mechanical reproduction has the potential to be mobilized for radical purposes. While ostensibly addressing the artistic consequences of technical reproducibility on art, Benjamin also addresses the wider political consequences of this shift.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin and the Media written by Jaeho Kang and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), one of the most original and perceptive thinkers of the twentieth century, offered a unique insight into the profound impact of the media on modern society. Jaeho Kang’s book offers a lucid introduction to Benjamin’s theory of the media and its continuing relevance today. The book provides a systematic and close reading of Benjamin’s critical and provocative writings on the intersection between media - from print to electronic - and modern experience, with reference to the information industry, the urban spectacle, and the aesthetic politics. Bringing Benjamin’s thought into a critical constellation with contemporary media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard, the book helps students understand the implications of Benjamin’s work for media studies today and how they can apply his distinctive ideas to contemporary media culture. Kang’s book leads to a fresh appreciation of Benjamin’s work and new insight into critical theoretical approaches to media. The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers not only in media and communication studies but also in cultural studies, film studies and social theory, who are seeking a readable overview of Benjamin’s rich yet complex writings.
Download or read book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Walter Benjamin and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance written by Paul Allain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is theatre? What is performance? What connects them and how are they different? What events, people, practices and ideas have shaped theatre and performance in the twentieth and twenty-first century? The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance offers some answers to these big questions. It provides an analytical, informative and engaging introduction to important people, companies, events, concepts and practices that have defined the complementary fields of theatre and performance studies. This fully updated second edition contains three easy to use alphabetized sections including over 120 revised entries on topics and people ranging from performance artist Ron Athey, to directors Vsevold Meyerhold and Robert Wilson, megamusicals , postdramatic theatre and documentation. Each entry includes crucial historical and contextual information, extensive cross-referencing, detailed analysis and an annotated bibliography. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance is a perfect reference guide for the keen student.
Download or read book Walter Benjamin written by Richard Wolin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.
Download or read book Illustration written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Positioning himself in the slippery divide between two highly charged critical approaches--deconstruction and cultural studies--J. Hillis Miller explains why the split occurred and offers, for the first time, an eloquent analysis of the goals and methods of cultural studies. Miller's Illustration is an intellectual adventure that transgresses the boundaries of critical theory to reveal the ideological forces at work. The result, art critic Norman Bryson concludes, "is an extraordinary performance". In a positive, constructive way, Miller describes cultural studies as, primarily, a means of contextualizing works of art. Relating the assumptions behind this approach to recent social, political, and technological changes, he shows how cultural studies is itself subject to its context and thus perhaps misguided insofar as it portrays art objects as "mere illustration". In particular, Miller considers new forms of electronic research in the humanities which, with their vast, homogenizing effect on data, can compel a critic to reconfigure information--in fact, to create the context that he or she means simply to identify. To illustrate this phenomenon, Miller investigates one topic of importance for cultural studies: the relation of verbal and visual forms in multimedia works. Drawing examples from Twain, Gorey, Mallarme, James, Ruskin, Heidegger, Dickens, and Turner, he shows how neither word nor image takes priority in such collaborations; nor is either a mere representation of a pre-existing reality. The transformations wrought by cultural artifacts on their contexts, Miller contends, must be identified through detailed and vigilant "rhetorical" readings if the force of a work of art is tobe passed on into the current cultural situation. And for the new form these readings take, the reader-critic must in turn assume responsibility.
Download or read book The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths written by Rosalind E. Krauss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1986-07-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.
Download or read book Ways of Seeing written by John Berger and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains seven essays. Three of them use only pictures. Examines the relationship between what we see and what we know.
Download or read book Modern Criticism written by Christopher Rollason and published by Atlantic Publishers & Dist. This book was released on 2002 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Anthology Assembles Sixteen Essays On Different Aspects Of Modern Criticism, By Some Of The Best Scholars From Six Countries And Four Continents. The Essays, Variously, Examine A Range Of Theoretical Perspectives, Point Up Key Issues In The Area Of Postcolonial Literary Studies, Or Open Up New Interdisciplinary Perspectives For The Future Of Criticism.Among The Critical Schools And Approaches Expounded By The Distinguished Contributors Are Postmodernism, Reader-Response Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Feminist Criticism And Marxist Criticism. The Concluding Essays Bring The Critical Debate Right Up-To-Date By Suggesting New Critical Paths For The Internet Age.The Contributors Included Such Reputed Experts, From India And Abroad, As T. Ravichandran, Nouri Gana, Prakash Chandra Pradhan, N. Raveendran, Gangadhar Gadgil, Anthonia Kalu, Mala Pandurang, Subhendu Mund, Dámaso Javier Vicente Blanco, And Virgílio Augusto Fernandes Almeida. This Rich And Diverse Volume Will Prove An Invaluable Source Of Reference And Stimulus For Further Thought, For Students And Scholars Alike.
Download or read book But Is It Art written by Cynthia Freeland and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2002-02-07 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today's art world many strange, even shocking, things qualify as art. In this book, Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many fascinating examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, museums, sex, and politics, clarifying contemporary and historical accounts of the nature, function, and interpretation of the arts. Freeland also propels us into the future by surveying cutting-edge web sites, along with the latest research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, provocative book engages with the big debates surrounding our responses to art and is an invaluable introduction to anyone interested in thinking about art.
