To Walter Benjamin (whose "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" encapsulates early modernist anxiety), originality was the be-all and end-all of culture. Repetition denies the very concept of the unique. From the Greeks, who knew only founding and stamping, to the woodcut and graphic art of the Renaissance, to movable type and lithography, to photography, then to film and sound film, the central concept of "authenticity" was being effaced. In a melancholy aside, Benjamin even notes that the worst staging of Faust is superior to the best film version of Faust in that the stage play more nearly imitates the first performance at Weimar and hence expresses Goethe's intent. Art loses its aura of ritual once secularized; its cultic value and fetishist power are depleted when shared with the hoi polloi. Mechanical reproduction means mass production, and mass distribution means mass consumption, and anything that the rabble has is, by definition, without value. Beneath this cultural Ludditeism lurks the dog-in-the-manger mentality of exact1y that kind of elite that the Marxists supposedly abhor. But Benjamin has a point: if everybody hears Beethoven, then Beethoven becomes vulgar. Print the Mona Lisa on a washcloth too many times and she loses her allure. As Huysmans observed, "The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdygurdies make it their own.” Familiarity even breeds ignorance. We all know that the William Tell overture precedes The Lone Ranger, not Rossini’s opera.
Art is all about exclusion, artificial scarcity.
Art is show business. Authenticity is irrelevant. A copy is as good as the original. Is it compelling, have I pulled the veil over the audience and persuaded them of its value? Is the NARRATIVE there?
The story makes it special...it re-sacralizes the copy, the Eucharist: bread/wine is the Museum/Critics: art
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