Select at least two passages passage from “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility” (1937), a famous essay by the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin written during the rise of Hitler in Germany during the 1930s on the eve of World War 2. The PDF to the passage will be in the uploaded files.
Then, in an 800 word essay, discuss the pasages you have selected in light of his broader arguments about art, mass media, and politics. This is a challenging essay, so feel free to select passages that may be opaque, confusing, or even seemingly contradictory, and pose questions/offer observations from there. The core of the argument is from pages 20-27 (meaning pages 20-27 of the scanned book itself, meaning starting on page 2 of the PDF), but please take your time to go through the whole thing.
In addition, watch the first 30 minutes of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a British public television show from the early 1970s based on the insights of Benjamin’s argument. Along with the two pasages from Benjamin, use at least one scene from the Berger video to illustrate your points/questions–and keep in mind that the very fact that Berger is using television as a mass medium of artistic education is a significant fact in it own right! Here is a link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
Finally, please consult this more recent piece, about how Benjamin’s text relates to the phenomenon of Trumpism in recent years, written just before the Jan 6 coup attempt. Feel free to use a pasage from this text as well in your response, but you are not obliged to do so: Here is a link to the article: https://www.salon.com/2020/12/05/trump-the-fascist-artist-how-the-maga-crowd-is-motivated-by-aesthetics-not-ideas/
