Walter Benjamin

Notes on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Preface Notes

Let me begin with a concession: Benjamin’s observation that Marx critiqued capitalism in its early stages carries a different weight today than it did in his own time. Then, the statement reaffirmed a commitment to historical materialism at a moment when its philosophical scaffolding still held firm. A gesture of orthodoxy intended to legitimize political aesthetics.¹

What remains valuable is Benjamin’s insistence that cultural criticism must meet prognostic standards. It implies responsibility: critique must not merely describe the world, but chart its transformations even if one disputes the prognosis², the demand for historical specificity remains.

“The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements.”

It is not urgency that justifies it, but function: the role of criticism is not simply to offer opinion, but to make sense of cultural forms in relation to the shifting conditions that produce them.

From this perspective, Benjamin’s next idea—though rooted in Marxist orthodoxy—still lands with force. Don’t waste time imagining the art of a revolution that hasn’t happened. That’s ungrounded, unfalsifiable theory. It doesn’t help us now. Focus on the present:

“However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. ”

How are changes in the means of reproduction (like photography and film) transforming not just art’s form, but its function?

“It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon.”

This is where things get slippery—the preface begins to falter and ultimately become less useful to a contemporary reader. These ideas are intended to be strategically useful in the fight against Fascism. In context, that urgency is understandable: Benjamin was a Jewish intellectual writing in exile, and would later die fleeing the advance of the Third Reich.

“They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense.”

But these are not innocent ideas. Benjamin sees them as ideological residues from a time when art served the ruling class by shrouding itself in divine mystery, genius myths, and timelessness. All concepts that mask art’s embeddedness in power structures.

Yet the erasure of those concepts invites its own problems. Soviet dekulakization, the Maoist Land Reform campaigns, the Four Cleanups Movement, and the Cultural Revolution all followed a similar logic of purification: eliminate the bourgeois subject to forge a revolutionary one. These campaigns mirrored, at times grotesquely, the fascist critique of the bourgeoisie in Mein Kampf:

• Weak, decadent, and self-interested

• Incapable of the sacrifice and unity required for national rebirth

• Spiritually bankrupt, obsessed with comfort and materialism

In all cases, political aesthetics turned into instruments of totalitarian violence.

“The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.”

Now he strikes a more confident, and arguably presumptive, note: His new concepts: the decay of the aura, reproducibility, and the politicization of art, are meant to de-fetishize art. They should resist myth-making and disrupt spectacle.³

And while Benjamin feared the myth-making capacity of fascism, he could not have foreseen that abundance itself, and the aesthetic of growth—depoliticized, wrapped in the optimism of the Space Age, midcentury design, and techno-futurist spectacle—would dominate cultural life well into the millennium.

But that dominance, too, eventually fractured. Art scattered in many directions at once: distributed, provisional, uncoordinated, uninstitutionalized. And this trend will only accelerate, as attempts to impose unity grow more suspect.

In this author’s opinion, we do not need a politics of art. We must begin with the refusal to be mobilized. Art for art’s sake doesn’t lead to institutional violence. Art that obeys does.

Chapter 1 Notes

In this section, Benjamin offers a concise and convincing overview of reproduction techniques. However, I would have begun by noting the deeper tradition of mimesis—art as imitation of nature—which predates the reproduction of man-made artifacts. Its absence narrows the historical framing.

With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case.

This is broadly accurate, but a little Eurocentric. Mesopotamian seal prints (c. 3200 BC) already mechanized image reproduction in a meaningful way.

As his account moves forward, what stands out is Benjamin’s framing of photography as a decisive historical break: a shift from manual craft to optical capture.

For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech. A film operator shooting a scene in the studio captures the images at the speed of an actor’s speech.

Wouldn’t use the word “devolved,” though—the term implies a loss that feels overstated. It risks undermining Benjamin’s position against “creative genius” by equating art to craft. ⁴

These convergent endeavors made predictable a situation which Paul Valéry pointed up in this sentence: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” (op. cit., p. 226)

Valéry was a visionary. This prediction feels strikingly contemporary in the age of streaming platforms and voice-controlled interfaces.

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations—the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film—have had on art in its traditional form.

This closing observation sets the stage for the rest of the text. Reproduction not only transformed how art is experienced—it became an artistic mode in its own right.

Chapter 2 Notes

This chapter introduces Benjamin’s thoughts on authenticity, aura, and how they are tied to the physical historical evidence of artworks, and how the loss of authenticity in mechanical reproduction destabilizes traditional artistic values. While largely compelling, several observations merit contemporary reconsideration:

This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.

Benjamin’s perspective is deeply rooted in his historical context. However, in our current digital age, this transformation has surpassed his initial predictions. The notions of uniqueness, physical condition, authenticity, and even ownership no longer retain practical significance. Authenticity today is verified algorithmically rather than physically, and traditional distinctions between original and reproduction have dissolved. The prevailing transactional model has shifted towards access rights managed by digital distribution channels, and if we dare go further; media is now produced and distributed live.

Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis à vis technical reproduction.

Benjamin accurately differentiates technical reproduction from manual reproduction. This distinction remains valid, particularly in the digital realm, where reproduction and live production have become integral to media distribution and consumption processes.

Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

His conceptualization of aura as the “quality of presence” inherently vulnerable to mechanical reproduction remains pertinent. Digital platforms intensify this loss of aura by continually recontextualizing art and media in ways Benjamin anticipated but could not fully foresee, reshaping the audience’s experience profoundly.

Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

Benjamin’s foresight on historical testimony’s reliance on authenticity remains incisive. Today, the erosion of physical authenticity and the proliferation of digitally mediated content render historical testimony unstable and vulnerable to reinterpretation. This vulnerability is notably evident through contemporary phenomena such as UGC, deep fakes and LLM-generated content, which further complicate and obscure historical narratives.

The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements.

Benjamin’s assertion regarding the shattering of tradition through mechanical reproduction remains valid. However, contemporary society witnesses the emergence of a new kind of aura rooted in symbolic rather than ritual or historical authenticity. Jean Baudrillard terms this phenomenon “sign value,” where objects derive worth from their symbolic representation of social status.⁵ Furthermore, media consumption also operates as a social signifier, signaling alignment with specific groups, ideologies, or cultural movements. Algorithms reinforce these dynamics by curating content that strengthens in-group identity and delineates boundaries from out-groups, turning media consumption into a nuanced system of social signaling and herding.

Benjamin’s linking of mechanical reproduction to mass movements and tradition’s erosion remains influential but is open to contestation. Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” challenges this perspective, arguing that mass media and reproduction do not democratize culture but instead consolidate spectacle and power structures. Debord maintains that such media foster an illusion of participation while promoting passivity and consumerism. Thus, reproduction may not necessarily yield genuine mass mobilization. One might argue art’s ability to mobilize masses politically is utopian, while it’s inability is beneficial and/or could be a misattributed cause-and-effect relationship.

Chapter 3 Notes

In this section, Benjamin argues that human perception is not a biological constant but a historically contingent mode of experience shaped by changing material conditions. He presents that aura has decayed due to modern reproductive technologies and the mass culture they enable. This loss, he contends, is not merely aesthetic but ideological: it reflects a shift toward immediacy, reproducibility, and statistical thinking that reshapes both how we see the world and how the world is made visible to us.

During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.

Benjamin begins by asserting that perception is not timeless, universal, or merely a biological constant—it is mediated. It changes in response to the structures, rhythms, and tools of human society. (While this author entertains the idea that economic and political organization may themselves function as tools or technologies, it’s worth noting that Benjamin does not address language. Yet the ability or inability to name something profoundly shapes whether it can be perceived or even thought about.)

And thus culture, technology, and institutions determine how we perceive the world, just as much as our eyes or ears do.

The fifth century, with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception. The scholars of the Viennese school, Riegl and Wickhoff, who resisted the weight of classical tradition under which these later art forms had been buried, were the first to draw conclusions from them concerning the organization of perception at the time. However farreaching their insight, these scholars limited themselves to showing the significant, formal hallmark which characterized perception in late Roman times.

Then Benjamin offers the waning days of the Roman Empire as a historical example to illustrate how shifts in social and political structures give rise to new perceptual frameworks. The emergence of the late Roman art industry and works like the Vienna Genesis reflected not just a stylistic break from antiquity but the development of an entirely new way of seeing. Art, in this view, becomes a record of changing sensibilities—a mirror of how a society perceives itself and its world.

Riegl and Wickhoff, scholars of the Viennese school, were among the first to recognize this. By rescuing late Roman art from the shadow of classical ideals, they showed that even marginalized or “decadent” styles could reveal meaningful transformations in perception. Yet their insights remained limited to form; they described what perception looked like in that period without examining why it changed. The deeper social and material forces at work were left unexamined.

They did not attempt—and, perhaps, saw no way—to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present.

Here, Benjamin identifies a critical gap: the earlier scholars lacked a theory of causality. Without a materialist framework, they were unable to link perceptual changes to broader social and economic transformations.

He argues that his own historical moment offers more favorable conditions for such an insight. There may be a touch of overconfidence in this claim; after all, interpreting the perceptual logic of one’s own time is naturally easier when the art is being produced contemporaneously. It’s also worth noting a tension in Benjamin’s position: if perception is historically determined, as he insists, then fully grasping the perceptual framework of a distant past would seemingly require occupying that same historical standpoint. While this author does not accept that premise, it does expose a potential contradiction in Benjamin’s reasoning.

And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.

He then sets his task: to analyze how the decay of the aura stems from identifiable, modern social developments.

The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.

While Benjamin’s central concern is the decay of aura in bourgeois art, he turns to nature to illustrate what aura is. He evokes a sensory image—a mountain range on the horizon, a shadowed branch overhead—to capture that meditative, immersive awareness we sometimes feel in the natural world. It’s not about what the object is, but about the manner of attention it inspires: something can be physically near yet feel distant in a way that commands reverence and contemplation.

This author, writing from South America, can’t help but wonder: if I could walk to the Sistine Chapel, would I need nature to understand what Benjamin means by aura? Would I still desire reproductions if I had regular access to the original?

This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.

Benjamin now contrasts this contemplative relationship with the distracted, instrumentalized vision enabled by modern media. The aura vanishes not simply due to technological reproduction, but because we no longer approach the world with the kind of sustained, reverent attention that once gave things their singular presence. The decline of aura, he argues, is bound to the desires and behaviors of the masses in an era defined by industrial-scale imagery.

This is the core of his critique. Reproduction fulfills a collective craving for immediacy and accessibility. Yet in seeking proximity, the masses erode the very conditions that make experience feel unique, deep, or meaningful. The slow, unmediated encounter marked by duration, presence, and contemplative stillness is replaced by curated framing and rapid consumption.

What remains unanswered is why the decay of aura, in Benjamin’s view, would prevent the kind of data processing associated with fascist aesthetics. It is also unclear why this decay would be desirable, especially if surrendering interpretive control to external mechanisms enables the political mobilization of perception in any direction, including those Benjamin opposed.

Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

Benjamin draws a parallel between the flattening of perception through reproduction and what he sees as the flattening of thought through the growing dominance of statistics. In his view, the singular and qualitative gives way to the general and quantitative; uniqueness is displaced by averages, and meaning by measurement.

Benjamin sees this as a boundless, reciprocal process: media reshapes mass perception, and mass perception in turn reshapes how reality is presented and understood. For him, this dynamic extends across both how we see and how we think, suggesting a total reorganization of experience under modern conditions.

This author disagrees with that framing. The rise of statistical thinking does not necessarily mark a decline in thought. On the contrary, statistical reasoning has often exposed the limits of supposedly “pure” perception or rationalism. Was the discrediting of geocentrism by astronomical data a flattening of insight? Is the the probabilistic clarity of quantum mechanics a betrayal of nuance? If anything, statistics offer a way to confront the distortions of intuition and ideology. Identifying a general trend allows us to position concepts as salient.

Likewise, the claim that the scope is “unlimited” deserves scrutiny. If perception and thought are entirely shaped by media, ideology, and internal logic and thus detached from material reality, they eventually collide with the world itself. There are constraints. Nature, bodies, and physical systems impose limits that ideology cannot override indefinitely. When thinking becomes too adjusted to constructed images or abstract systems⁶, it risks becoming not more attuned to reality, but more estranged from it.

Chapter 4 Notes

In this section Benjamin argues that the aura of a work of art was originally rooted in its ritual function, whether magical or religious. Over time, this ritual basis was secularized into the “cult of beauty,”⁷ which dominated artistic value through the Renaissance and beyond. However, he argues that the rise of photography and other reproducible media severed this connection, displacing aura and challenging the authority of the original. In this new context, Benjamin claims, the function of art is no longer grounded in tradition but increasingly oriented toward political expression.

The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.

Benjamin opens by asserting that a work’s uniqueness is not intrinsic, but arises from its historical embeddedness. Uniqueness is not a metaphysical property; it is contingent on how a work is situated within tradition. And tradition, far from static, is an evolving social construct.

An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind.

This example illustrates how aura can survive even as the surrounding tradition shifts radically. The object remains materially the same, but the meaning projected onto it varies wildly: from divine to demonic. Yet both groups experience it as singular, reverent, and powerful.

Building on this, Benjamin introduces a particular claim: that the original function of art was ritualistic. Art, he argues, emerged not as a vehicle for aesthetic contemplation but in service of collective magical or religious practice. The earliest cave paintings and idols were not “art” in the modern sense—they were used, not viewed.

This raises a tension in Benjamin’s framing. By identifying these early ritual objects as “art,” he retroactively applies a post-Renaissance concept to cultures that may not have recognized such a category. Did the Greeks understand these objects as art, or simply as sacred instruments? Benjamin’s argument depends on a historical continuity that may itself be shaped by modern assumptions.

It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it.

Aura, according to Benjamin, is tied to ritual use, not aesthetic contemplation. “Authenticity” derives from a piece’s place in a liturgical or social ceremony. Its authority was functional and historical, not visual or emotional.

Even after religion fades, the structure of ritual persists. The “cult of beauty” in the modern artworld—museums, galleries, critics, and collectors—is a kind of secularized priesthood. Aura lingers not as divine presence, but as connoisseurial reverence.

Benjamin points to a historical rupture: the Renaissance initiated a secular ritual—aesthetic contemplation for its own sake. But this framing invites further scrutiny. Was the Renaissance truly the birth of a disinterested aesthetic culture, or was it the moment when the powerful began to inscribe themselves into art—through patronage, influence, and even literal cameos? Rather than a clean shift from ritual to beauty, it may have been a transfer of ritual authority to a new elite, one that used beauty to project political and personal power under the guise of taste.

But this raises a complication. Beauty, as a guiding value in art, has largely been abandoned within elite cultural institutions, even as the ritual framework persists. The “cult” remains, but it now orbits ideas like transgression, irony and institutional critique. Meanwhile, what is often labeled—sometimes dismissively—as “the masses” continue to seek art that is beautiful, emotionally resonant, and universal. If aura once depended on ritual, and ritual once elevated beauty, then what exactly is being preserved in the post-beauty artworld?

With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later.

The twin births of photography and socialism signaled a dual crisis: the undermining of the old ritual/aura model, and the emergence of new, mass-based forms of culture and politics. Photography democratizes visual access; socialism questions cultural ownership and hierarchy.

At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of ‘pure’ art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarmé was the first to take this position.) An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.

Art for art’s sake is, to Benjamin, a reactionary turn—a defensive theology meant to preserve aura in an era that threatens to dissolve it. By rejecting both social function and subject matter, “pure art” elevates itself to a transcendent, self-contained realm, even as it detaches from historical and political currents.

This sets the stage for Benjamin’s central claim: mechanical reproduction, especially through photography and film, severs the long-standing bond between art and ritual. Art is no longer tethered to the temple, the altar, or the salon. It begins to circulate outside traditional contexts, freed from its cultic origins.

But in this author’s view, what was truly excised from the “cult” was not ritual itself, but the combined presence of aura and beauty. What emerged instead was the art object as an ultra–Veblen good: valued not for use or contemplation, but as a symbol of exclusion. These works are desirable precisely because they are inaccessible—tokens of what cannot be had, even more than what can be seen. The aura may have decayed in one sense, but in another, it was refashioned into scarcity-as-status.

This transformation becomes especially visible in the rise of conceptual and post-conceptual art, particularly from the 1970s onward, where materiality, beauty, and even craftsmanship were deliberately devalued. What mattered was not the image or the object itself, but the context, the certificate, the idea. In this environment, the gallery, the collector, and the institutional label became the new ritual apparatus—preserving aura not through presence, but through controlled scarcity and coded legitimacy. The art world responded in kind: as works became less visibly “artisanal,” their value grew increasingly speculative, anchored in social capital and institutional endorsement.

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 makes no sense.

Rather than artworks being copied post hoc, many modern works are conceived with reproduction in mind: prints, films, albums, and now even memes are made to be multiplied. The original is not sacred—there is none.

This obliterates the concept of authenticity. Unlike a painting, a photo negative has no “original” image. All prints are equal—or at least equally reproducible.

In this author’s opinion, mechanical reproduction did not destroy the cultic function of art; it divided it. While Benjamin argues that the loss of authenticity reverses the function of art from ritual to politics, what also emerges is a split in the economy of aura itself. On one side, the art world cultivates scarcity through opaque, often non-beautiful works accessible primarily to insiders. On the other, mass culture delivers endlessly reproducible, emotionally resonant, and aesthetically pleasing content designed for broad consumption. Aura was not eliminated—it was redistributed, repackaged through divergent systems of value and access.

But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.

Benjamin then takes a radical turn, and presents his prognosis for the future of art: when ritual fades, politics rushes in. Art becomes a tool not for transcendence, but for influence. Not for worship, but for struggle. Mechanical reproduction enables art to be wielded—not just revered.

Yet in this author’s view, reality diverged from Benjamin’s vision. Within the art world, art became political in content, but remained embedded in the cultic structures of scarcity, institutional gatekeeping, and elite circulation. Meanwhile, mass art continued to pursue emotional resonance, and for some within social media ecosystems it began to function as sign value: content consumed not only for its affective qualities, but for the social, cultural, or ideological affiliations it signals. In this way, both forms of art became political, but in exclusionary ways—not in the mobilizing, revolutionary sense Benjamin envisioned and hoped for. The politics that emerged are symbolic, fragmented, and performative, shaped more by alignment than by obedience.

Chapter 5 notes

This is Benjamin’s clearest articulation of the polarity between cult value and exhibition value in art, and suggests that the origins of artistic production lie not in visibility but in ritual function. This emphasis may be partially explained by the linguistic and philosophical weight of the word Kunst in German. Unlike the English “art,” which traces its roots to the Proto-Indo-European ar- (“to fit together, assemble”), Kunst derives from ǵenə- (“to know, produce”), linking it to knowledge, capacity, and practiced skill. More importantly, this lineage frames Kunst as something inward-facing, grounded in expertise and tradition—something one knows, rather than something one necessarily shows. Benjamin, writing in German, inherits a term already saturated with associations of inherited knowledge and cultural transmission. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that he roots the genesis of Kunstwerke in the sacred: objects meant for gods, spirits, or priests, hidden from public view and valued for their ritual presence rather than their aesthetic display. This sets the stage for the chapter’s perspective—that the modern shift toward exhibition, accelerated by mechanical reproduction, marks not just a change in degree, but a transformation in the very nature of art | kunst.

Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work.

These are not merely two functions of art, but opposing forces that define the work’s role in culture. Cult value is about presence, reverence, and ritual; exhibition value is about display, visibility, and circulation. In a sense, these values correspond to older and newer regimes of attention; closed systems of belief versus open systems of spectatorship.

Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits.

Here, Benjamin reaffirms his thesis that the earliest function of art was not aesthetic but operative. The value of the image lay in its efficacy within a ritual or magical system. Visibility, if present, was incidental. In other words, art was not for looking—it was for doing, for enacting power. This aligns with the etymology of Kunst as rooted in knowledge and capacity, not display.

However, recent research⁸ suggests that cave paintings may have served communicative purposes; while they remain operative, their function was to be seen. Patterns of dots, lines, and other symbols found alongside animal depictions in European caves have been interpreted as a form of proto-writing, potentially conveying information about animal behavior, seasonal cycles, or migratory patterns. This implies that early humans may have used cave art not for ritual, but as a means of recording and transmitting practical knowledge. And if I may apply Occam’s razor: cave paintings were not “hidden” for sacred reasons, but protected from the elements—after all, we can still see them.

Therefore, while Benjamin emphasizes the ritualistic origins of art, it is equally plausible that early artworks functioned first and foremost as tools for communication.

Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level.

Even if we set aside the debated origins of cave paintings, Benjamin is correct in observing that in later religious contexts, cult value asserts itself through controlled access managed by specific individuals in positions of authority.

With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple.

Benjamin links the shift away from cult value to the emergence of portable, distributable, viewable objects. This is a technological as well as a cultural shift. The movement from embedded to mobile, from fixed to fluid, corresponds with a broader historical transformation: art exits the temple and enters circulation.

The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.

Painting, unlike fresco or mosaic, can be moved, sold, and displayed in multiple contexts. The same logic applies to music: the symphony emerges not just as a new form, but as a more presentable one—one suited to performance and repetition and mass emotional impact that can surpass religious fervor within the confines of a church.

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature.

This is a key line. The increasing quantity of exposure leads to a qualitative change in what art is. The tension between cult and exhibition value isn’t just a scale, it’s a threshold. Once enough works become viewable, reproducible, and circulated, the very function of art changes. This is Benjamin’s logic of historical materialism applied to aesthetics: form follows condition.

This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art.

Just as prehistoric objects were not originally seen as “art” but only retrospectively classified as such, Benjamin argues that future audiences may look back at modern “art” and recognize its function as something else entirely. The artistic function may be incidental to its actual social utility.

In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.

This is the chapter’s most destabilizing claim: that what we currently label as “art” may not, in retrospect, be art at all in any essential sense. Its artistic dimension is a side effect of deeper forces; visibility, reproducibility, distribution and the market.

This much is certain: today photography and the film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.

Benjamin closes stating that photography and film are not merely new media, but harbingers of a shift in art’s ontology. They embody exhibition value to such an extent that ritual vanishes entirely. Their existence depends on reproducibility, and their meaning is produced through circulation.

And this is hard to argue against.

Chapter 6 notes

In this section, Benjamin argues that the shift in art’s ontology manifests as a withdrawal: first of cult value, then of presence, then of interpretive freedom. But it is also about a reorganization of meaning: how images, once objects of contemplation, become objects of persuasion and once they do they start to speak in sequence, in context. This is the beginning of art being operationalized as discourse.

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.

Benjamin opens by describing a transitional moment: in the age of photography, cult value retreats into one last bastion—the human face. Even as reproducibility takes over, portraiture preserves something like ritual presence. The photograph, especially in its early forms, does not just show a person—it attempts to preserve something irreducible about their being.

Early photography, especially portraiture, still bore traces of it—an attempt to hold onto presence, to ritualize memory. The aura here is not derived from ritual use, but from emotional relation. It’s worth noting how Benjamin’s own language begins to echo the aesthetic register he normally critiques—“melancholy,” “incomparable beauty”—as though even he cannot resist the aura of the human image.

Footnotes

1. From a contemporary vantage point, however, this appeal to “early capitalism” can feel naïve or even circular, especially when viewed against the disillusionment surrounding “late-stage capitalism,” the political collapse of the Soviet Union, and the economic pivot from Maoism to Dengism in China. ↩

2. The claim that capitalism would not only intensify exploitation but also ultimately create the conditions for its own abolition now reads more as metaphysical faith than material analysis. While exploitation persists in various forms, the broader trend has been a dramatic rise in global living standards. In China, following the 1978 reforms, Dengism abandoned the Marxist emphasis on class struggle as the motor of history, recasting development itself as the central task of socialism. “Development is the hard truth” (发展才是硬道理) became the guiding slogan of this shift. ↩

3. The same year Benjamin published this essay, Triumph of the Will was released (1935). The reproducibility of film, far from preventing fascist aesthetics, became their vehicle. The politicization of art, far from undermining fascism, became its propaganda arm. Even the aura didn’t so much decay as transfer—from original artwork to orchestrated myth. Fascism did not resist the new means of production; it did not use them unthinkingly. It mastered them—with precision and intent—for its own sinister ends. ↩

4. This may reflect a limitation in the translation, but it’s also a shortcoming on my part as I haven’t consulted the original German directly to confirm what word Benjamin actually used. ↩

5. Luxury goods epitomize this concept, consumed primarily for the prestige they impart rather than intrinsic qualities. Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption” complements Baudrillard’s idea, highlighting how elevated prices enhance a good’s desirability as a status symbol. ↩

6. And of course a statistical lens can also distort perception: a contemporary example of this kind of perceptual estrangement is content curation on social media platforms. Recommendation systems can be statistically optimized for engagement rather than truth, creating feedback loops that reinforce narrow worldviews. A similar dynamic can be observed in the humanities, where institutional incentives push academics to publish frequently and cite one another in status-driven loops that detach scholarly work from material realities. But in both cases, whether it is social media disinformation or sociological research that informs public policy, the adjustment to a mediated reality is not unlimited. Eventually, it breaks against the constraints of biology, physics, and consequence. ↩

7. This idea is thoroughly analyzed in George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art proposes that a work of art is defined by its acceptance within the framework of the “artworld” the network of institutions, curators, critics, and conventions that collectively confer art status. See: George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). ↩

8. Research by Bennett Bacon et al. (2023) identified recurring symbols; dots, lines, and Y-shaped signsadjacent to animal images in European cave sites such as Lascaux and Niaux. These marks are hypothesized to encode information about mating and birthing seasons, making them among the earliest known forms of data notation. See: Bacon, B., et al. “An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-Writing System and Phenological Calendar.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2023). ↩