Art Commodity: Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Mass Production in Art
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Time to read 11 min
Questions Answered in This Blog Post
What does Walter Benjamin mean when he talks about art and its cult value?
How does the purpose and use of art change over time, and how do technological advances commodify how we interact with art?
Why is the cheapening of art a problem for more than just art snobs?
The meme to start with:
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was born in Berlin. He spent his time racking up a formidable education, like many of the Continental dudes of his day. Jewish, Benjamin, while he did not take up philosophy professionally, began to write on social issues, Marxist criticism, and Jewish mysticism.
One of the coolest things about Benjamin’s work is how eclectic it was. He is one of those odd 20th century thinkers who didn’t really fit into any category, and unapologetically so. He was dancing to his own beat and proud of it.
Unfortunately, as a Jew of German origins, Benjamin had to escape Europe, even though he knew a lot of cool people from the Frankfurt School, and the intellectual powerhouses of Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, etc.. He was not quiet, even after he left Germany, letting his displeasure of the Third Reich be known in his writing.
And if there is something fascists don’t like, it’s people, especially prominent people, speaking up against the awful things they are doing. You don’t want to interrupt the flow of evil, lest people fight back and destroy you.
Benjamin fled from an occupied Paris to Spain in 1940, under the condition that he and those who were fleeing with him would get from there to safe passage to the United States, where they would try to build new lives in exile. He never made it, as Spanish authorities came between his group and their chance of getting out.
He poisoned himself with morphine pills. He would rather die than get into the hands of the Third Reich. He was only 48 when he passed away.
Not Quite Marxist but Marx Inspired
Walter Benjamin would never refer to himself as a Marxist in the same way that those of the Frankfurt School were, in the same way that the fervent admirers of Karl joyfully proclaimed. He was, like David S. Pumpkins, his own thing.
However, Benjamin would definitely take what he could from something that had good ideas, and use them in his own work. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Benjamin borrows some of Marx’s ideas on industrialization, but applies them to artwork, technology, and their relationship to politics and the darkness of fascism.
He never taught philosophy, but was supported by philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two of the big names in the Frankfurt School, a school of Marxist critical theorists. We’ve discussed some of their work here before.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” criticises the inclination to use technology to reproduce art, particularly in the form of cinema, which was coming into its own in the 1930s. Benjamin and his contemporaries grew up through the invention and innovation of the movie, with “talkies” a recent addition. The Jazz Singer (1927) would usher in a new era for film.
In cinema, Benjamin argues, we create a very specific form of art that is the mass art of manipulation. Through the use of the camera lens, we orchestrate something that is similar to a work of art, but not quite there. Let’s see how he makes this argument.
The History of the Work of Art
The first point that Benjamin makes when he discusses art is the history of artworks in general, a genealogy, if you will. In history, art is produced for a ritualistic purpose. A “cult” value, if you will. If you think about the Ancient Greeks, the sexy lady statues were not made to look hot. They definitely looked hot, but they were created out of reverence for deities, like Aphodite, or Athena, etc. The list goes on.
Similarly, Benjamin continues, throughout the Middle Ages, people created artworks like altarpieces, monuments in cathedrals that were meant to be shared on certain days for religious purposes. They were self-contained, and did not travel, nor would the original artwork have been reproduced on a mass scale.
The meaning, Benjamin argues, changes over the years, with the sexy ladies the Greeks revered becoming cringe sexy ladies for those in the Middle Ages. But the ritual value of art changes once it becomes secular. In the Renaissance, the ritual value in the religious purpose of art turns into the cult of beauty. Eventually, it becomes “art for art’s sake.”
The point of art is that it exists in a particular time and space. It was created by the artist for a purpose, in a particular time and space. Consider an art dealer, who takes the provenance of a work into account, looking how it passes from hand to hand, determining its authenticity. It’s similar, in that mechanical reproduction of an artwork devalues that artwork’s authenticity, its originality, its tradition.
Once created, every original artwork has what Benjamin calls its “aura.” And while this aura might change over time, it still exists, the ritual and traditional aspects of it still exist.
Two Values: Cult Value and Exhibition Value
In the creation of and display of works of art, humans have used two different values as reasons for crafting. Like the Greeks and the Medieval Christians, the cult value was the value of the artwork. For them, the importance of the art was for its place in worship, its use in ritualistic ceremonies.
In modern ideology, the value of art lies more in its display value. It’s not so much about using an artwork for a ritual, like bringing out a particular Madonna in May, perhaps, but about how you can get everyone looking at it for as long as you want. Imagine the very cluttered looking walls of a Victorian art exhibition. Wall to wall paintings in elaborate frames, hung side by side because they looked good.
In his contemporary age, Benjamin argues, people want to take the cult value from the work of art, to secularize it, and then to take it as their own, to make it more available to a public that clearly wants to consume. The more an artwork is reproduced, the more transitory it becomes, the less permanence it has of itself.
Once an artwork loses its uniqueness, the more it becomes divorced from its tradition and the cheaper it becomes.
Rossetti and Theodore Watts-Dunton at 16 Cheyne Walk by Victorian artist Henry Treffry, a painting of a painter and a poet. Courtesy of Wiki Commons
Art and the Camera: A New Technology
Benjamin’s main point here, though, revolves around this new technology of cinema, but rather than using the snobbery of an art critic, he proposes a problem that is more disturbing for cinema and mass produced art in general.
There is, Benjamin argues, a worrying distance and alienation in film that did not occur in older forms of art, such as sculpture or painting. A statue or a painting can be experienced directly through the senses, whereas with film, there is a certain amount of illusory perception, which is filtered through the lens of the camera.
A sculptor, for instance, chisels away at the statue she is making, creating a tangible piece that can be experienced by the observer walking around its three dimensional form, or even the touch of the observer’s hand against the smoothness of the marble (don’t do that in a museum ever). The tangibility along with the history that Benjamin writes about earlier in the essay, allows for an authentic experience of the art, and the artwork retains a permanence that is essential to it.
But the illusion of cinema gives it a certain superficiality. Special effects have been a thing since Le voyage dans la lune (1902), one of the first science fiction movies, but as the technology for film matures, there is little to no way to see the “man behind the curtain,” to see that this is illusion, that this is something that was pieced together.
And this is an important point to make, because Benjamin believes the superficiality of cinema can lend it to something that is very, very bad. Because in trying to get closer to the public, to the viewer, film simultaneously alienates itself from the actor, the public, and the cinematographer. The overproximity to what is being created becomes an issue. There is no objectivity as there is, for instance, in painting en plein air.
What’s the Problem?
The problem in the way cinema simultaneously gets close to us and alienates us lies in the way it can be used to create an aesthetic that should not exist. The illusory nature of film, and the “quantity over quality” mixed with the cult of personality of the celebs can twist and turn what people consider aesthetic. It can change taste. It can change minds.
Poignantly, Benjamin brings it all together in the Epilogue of this essay. If you think he was being a snob, he is about to show you that he is not, for real.
Consider the time period. Benjamin was writing in the 1930s and propaganda was a tool that so many nations found incredibly useful. We often think of posters that governments created to get people to go to war, to inspire patriotism and nationalism out of the citizens, to get people to obey the government.
But propaganda was not limited to pamphlets and posters during this time. Many of the biggest Weimar-era movie stars were moving out of Germany for obvious reasons, but that was not gonna stop the Führer from building his own A-list of actors to make nationalist movies for forced fans, to increase morale for his genocidal plans.
This is where technology driven and commodified art can lead. Anyone can make it and make their own aesthetic beautiful. For Hitler and friends, that was the systematic destruction of many ethnic and minority groups within Germany, and the elevation of white supremacy. For Hitler, it was to show beauty in the rubble of humanity, and in the abhorrent hatred of a few. Art loses its meaning. It is what the people in control make it.
Benjamin explains it the best in this way:
“All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. . .Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.” –Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction” (1936)
Bringing It Together: Propaganda, AI, and Us
Walter Benjamin may have been speaking from a time when movies were still in their infancy. At this current time, even green screens are kind of an old device. He could not have known, in 1940 when he took the pills that would end his life, the toll that the Second World War would take, and that governments would decide to add on some side wars at their leisure (totally not looking at you, United States).
He also couldn’t have known about the quick turn technology would take. He couldn’t have known that shortform video content would become the most popular of all, and that going to the movies would be a thing most of us do once a year, if ever.
Yet his points remain salient, as we watch in horror as a certain orange aspirational dictator posts AI-generated videos of himself dumping excrement on the United States. As the administration of aforesaid “Fanta Führer” creates an entirely new narrative with recruitment commercials for ICE, and plays music they weren’t meant to play while trying to turn the public to a war no one wanted, I am reminded of Benjamin’s take. They have the property, the technology, the resources, and the means to produce (in every sense of the word).
When I first encountered this essay about 20 years ago, I thought immediately of the way I liked to take pictures of Impressionist paintings from calendars. I would hang them in my room as a teenager. I really liked how pretty they were, really liked that you could almost feel the brushstrokes, even though it was a reproduction. I bought stationery with Monet and Van Gogh’s paintings to send to others, or more likely, to hoard. The reproduction of artwork I could not touch became a large part of my personality. I still try to stop hitting the “BUY NOW” button when I see a dress that incorporates Starry Night into its pattern.
Seeing some of Van Gogh and Monet’s work at the High Museum in Atlanta made me reconsider this commodification of art. You could see the brushstrokes when you stood in front of it. You could see that, if you walked close enough, that woman doesn’t really have facial features. You could see why these painters painted as they did, and understand why they spent years studying and then burned it down for new artforms.
I thought, seeing Café Terrace at Night in real life, or Girl with a Pearl Earring, it was so much more impactful than throwing those on a greeting card and offering to others a sort of shorthand for my own personality in the process. We are not what we own, what we wear, what we buy.
The advent of AI frustrates this process even further, as so many of us knew we would never be artists or writers, and yet we had the means to create in the simplest of ways. In 2023, I started playing with AI “art” for a long period. I thought it was amusing to see Frankenstein’s creation in the style of Lisa Frank, and to see how accurately I could create things that combined creepy and rococo. I did not understand the cost, thought if I used names of people who were long dead and kept the “art” to myself, that it was harmless.
The model of AI that most people use for “art” and “writing” cannot be art or writing, as it does what Benjamin claims that cinema did. We use it in the most intimate of ways, but the “art” we are pulling from it is commodified versions of what other people have made, is something that impacts the livelihood of artists and writers, culling from their long-dead (or sometimes living) counterparts. The commodification alienates us from our own humanity.
And just as Benjamin feared in 1936, in 2026, the aesthetic is being twisted into a means for war.
Summary:
In history, art was used for ritual, or "cult" purposes, tied to religious practices.
As the modern era progressed, the purpose and use of art turned toward the cult of beauty and "art for art's sake."
Technological advances degrade the permanence of art and its function.
Such technological advances as cinema can be easily used by propagandists in the promotion of war.
We can see similar issues in the encouragement of the use of AI in "art" and "writing."
C. M. Black
C. M. Black holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan College and an M.A. in Technical and Professional Writing from Middle Georgia State University. A lifelong goth, she resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where she works as a professional writer. You can view more of her work on Substack, or follow her on Bluesky and Facebook.
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