ACFM Microdose: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

**Nadia Idle** (0:02)
This is Acid Mad.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:20)
Hello, and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as usual with my friends Nadia Idol.

**Nadia Idle** (0:28)
Hello.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:29)
And Keir Milburn.

**Keir Milburn** (0:30)
Hello.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:31)
And today in this microdose episode of ACFM, we're going to be talking about Walter Benjamin's classic essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
At least that is how it's most commonly translated into English. Keir, this was your idea, it's a good idea. Why are we doing it? Why are we talking about this essay by a Marxist philosopher from the 1930s?

**Keir Milburn** (0:56)
Well, first of all, we haven't done a reading session for a while. So every now and then we take a text and we read through it. Are we going to read through this text page by page or aphorism by aphorism, perhaps we'll put it that way. And so dear listeners, if you want to read along with us, this text is really widely available online. You could go and download it. We're talking, we're going to read through the most famous iteration of this text. There's a few different iterations and we're doing the one which was published in the book Illuminations in 1969, the first English translation.
So it's the most common one, et cetera. So you just go around, you can go, you just pause now, go download it and read along if you so wish. The reason I thought it'd be a good text to read was, well, firstly, because we've just done an episode about shock and we mentioned Benjamin and Baudelaire and people like this on the idea of shock. In that we'd sort of talked a little bit about Benjamin's writings about film and stuff and about how he had quite a subtle conception of shock. And I thought it'll be really interesting to get into it a little bit more, basically, try to think through that problem of like, well, how do we politicize shock?
Beyond that though, it's just this really classic text on art and how we can politicize that. Or think about art in a way that our perception of art and culture more widely basically changes as society changes. That's something really interesting to think about. It's a text that people go back to a lot, basically. I remember a big wave of people going back to this around the turn of the century to think about digital reproduction, basically. That, you know, we got to this stage where reproducing property in digital form, you know, images, et cetera, had got to such a low cost, it was virtually free. And people were trying to think through what that would mean. There's been all sorts of developments since then. We might touch on non-fungible tokens, NFTs, board ape, all these sorts of things. We might even talk about AI, artificial intelligence and like that sort of AI generated images and text, et cetera. We might talk about that sort of stuff. Yeah, but that's the reason I thought it might be an interesting text to go through.

**Nadia Idle** (3:07)
Annoyingly, this is yet another one of Keir's brilliant ideas.
I'm very happy that he made this suggestion. Thank you, Keir, for bringing this text. I didn't know about this text, but I hadn't read it or when I did read it was a very long time ago. I think it's an excellent text for us to read with you listeners and to take apart and analyze. I suppose that there's some really interesting concepts in there which develop out of this kind of theorizing of shock like Keir mentioned. I'm particularly interested in this idea of aura and this idea that how art has developed as no longer being in situ and I can see a lot of parallels with that with the digital age. I teach media and communication, so I'm really interested in media theory and this is really interesting preliminary text for people thinking about media theory particularly, but also as I was reading through, there were several things which pointed to really interesting observations and kind of theoretical underpinning around stuff like the subject and the audience and especially what distraction is and the attention economy. As somebody who is interested in and a practitioner of engagement, I'm very much interested in engagement in social movements. I'm particularly interested in how that kind of interfaces with our digital reality in the 21st century. I actually found a lot in this text that I found useful in thinking about parallels for today. Then of course, like Keir mentioned, the stuff on art and the social function of art.