I briefly mentioned in passing on a previous post that Clement Greenberg's late modernist relationship between avant garde painting and photography as kitsch had been undermined by the mechanical reproduction of photography. I also briefly mentioned that an effect of photography had been to change our understanding of art.

What I had in mind was the work of Walter Benjamin and his argument that technological reproduction alters the way we look at reality. Benjamin argues that because of mechanical mass reproduction, art has lost its "authenticity" in the capitalist-oriented culture industry of the 20th century. This shift in attitudes to art from the hollowing out of art's traditional aura is the result of the introduction of mechanical means of reproduction.

Benjamin also emphasized the liberating, democratizing influences of the new techologies---still photography and film. The new mechanical means of reproduction of art undermined the foundations of traditional setup of one-off paintings produced by artists for their patrons in which the means of artistic production remain in the control of the rich and powerful. This was radically altered because mechanical reproduction meant that many more people could acquire the means to either take photographs of a work of art, or to be able to buy a cheap photograph, postcard, or print of the work.

This new media had the effect of fundamentally altering the relations between signifying systems in society as it eased the rigid divide between the art institution and the culture industry in which art protests the vulgarity of the market. The products of the culture industry could no longer be dismissed as kitsch, artistic trash and bad taste; or more politely, as the dross of art caused by art compromising itself with the market.

Another way looking at this transformation is in terms of the primacy of visual culture. This is best expressed by John Berger in his Ways of Seeing. Here he argues that our ways of seeing have a history:

"Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way."

In many ways what Benjamin was exploring, the historical transformation of art due to the mechanical reproduction of photographic images, is a history that we have been living through. This episode in the history of our visual culture has run its course, as we are now living through another one----the digital reproduction of images. In the digital era, with its computers, virtual reality, and the everyday circulation of images the digital form of image making takes on a life of its own.

In this world of the musem without walls there both an ongoing and infinite (re)production of images, and an endless change of these images. Not only is authenticity almost irrelevent the idea of authorship is almost obsolete.