Portraits of Lola

Abstract

In a famous 1938 essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German Jewish philosopher, literary theorist, and social critic Walter Benjamin comes up with a striking way to differentiate paintings from photographs. A painting is a singular work of art, surrounded by an “aura,” which only intensifies over time and reveals the extent to which regard for high art has borrowed from ritual and religion. Even if art increasingly cuts itself off from religious service starting sometime in the early modern period, the cult of beauty and art for art’s sake persists in a quasireligious mode. A photograph, on the other hand, is “mechanically reproducible” and involves an entirely different aesthetics and mode of reception. What the camera sees and captures differs significantly from what the artist’s eye perceives and the brush portrays. We know that the “Mona Lisa” is in the Louvre. But where is the original of a photograph? “To ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense,” writes Benjamin. “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” (224). Reproducible art never imagines a single beholder. It aims at a mass audience. And that is where politics comes in.