Art-Making in the Age of Digital Reproduction
- Paper for the Society for the Philosophic Study of Contemporary Visual Arts
- In conjunction with the American Philosophical Association Central Division Meeting, 2000
In this paper, I intend to provide a cultural and aesthetic analysis of the ways in which aesthetic judgements and valuation of traditional art inform and constrain the aesthetic judgements and valuation of contemporary digital art.
For the purpose of this analysis, I am defining traditional art as work in a medium that does not use mechanical reproduction, art that exists in a particular time and place as a sole and "authentic" object. Medium here, then, serves as a primary descriptor of what is "traditional" as opposed to a historical discussion and evaluation of particular works of art. Using this definition, traditional art media primarily include painting, drawing, and sculpture. Crafts, such as ceramics, fibers, glass, and metal-smithing, fall into this category only in the 20th century as exhibition of fine arts included objects--produced for such exhibition by contemporary visual artists--that were once considered primarily functional or related to ritualistic use.
The second category of media that is germane to this discussion is mechanically reproduced work, as introduced by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In this work, Benjamin discusses the move of art from having cult or ritualistic value to exhibition value, and argues that the "aura" of a work of art is destroyed by reproduction. "Reproduction is lacking one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happened to be," he writes; the "presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity." (222) Although Benjamin pays a great deal of attention to film as a mechanically reproduced art form in his analysis, I would argue that film, although originally mechanically reproduced, is a time-based medium that foreshadows important issues more relevant to digitally reproduced media than mechanically reproduced media. Therefore, for the purpose of this presentation, I will define mechanically reproduced work as artwork produced in multiples, work that primarily imitates traditional art forms. Reproduction, or the existence of multiple copies, changes the relationship of viewer to art object by imitating, but not being the sole and "authentic" object. Printmaking and photography, excluding the monoprint and the Poloroid, are two such media.