SESSION 4.

20th CENTURYcontinued

DAMIEN HIRST: SKULL, For the Love of God, 2007

BASQUIAT: THE SKULL - 1984

WALTER BENJAMIN

WALTER BENJAMIN

• 1) To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.

• 2) The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the "personality" outside the studio.

• 3) The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice;

the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. • 4) Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. • 5) By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of

familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. . . . With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended.

WALTER BENJAMIN

Walter Benjamin defines aura: as the distance between a purveyor of the work of

art and the work itself.

With the advent of mechanical reproduction, the distance has been closed, aura diminished, and the work of art democratized.

WALTER BENJAMIN

AURA

of a work of art as an expression of

"its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be".

WALTER BENJAMIN

”…looking at someone carries the implicit expectation that our look will be returned by the object of our gaze. Where this expectation is met…there is an experience of the aura to the fullest extent. Experience of the aura [in objects] thus rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.”

Baudelaire

WALTER BENJAMIN

” ONE OF THE FOREMOST TASKS OF ART HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE CREATION OF A DEMAND WHICH COULD BE FULLY SATISFIED ONLY LATER.”

WALTER BENJAMIN

”THE LOGICAL RESULT OF FASCISM IS THE INTRODUCTION OF AESTHETICS INTO POLITICAL LIFE”

”...THE PRODUCTION OF RITUAL VALUES.”

”COMMUNISM RESPONDS WITH POLITICIZING ART.”

WALTER BENJAMIN

• TRY TO DEFINE ‘AURA’ AND GIVE EXAMPLES

• POLITICS OF ART (EXAMPLES)• IS W. B. RIGHT? IN WHAT ASPECTS?• CAN ‘MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION’ BE

MANIPULATIVE? WHY? HOW?• IS THE WITHERING OF AURA A POSITIVE

PHENOMENON?

THE SOCIAL INFLUENCE

ELLIOT ARONSON: ‘THE SOCIAL ANIMAL’

• CONFORMITY

• MASS COMMUNICATION, PROPAGANDA, PERSUASION

• SOCIAL COGNITION

• SELF-JUSTIFICATION

• HUMAN AGGRESSION

• PREJUDICE

• LIKING, LOVING & INTERPERSONAL SENSITIVITY

THE AGE OF PROPAGANDAE. ARONSON

“It is our hope that knowledge about the process of persuasion will allow all of us to detect and resist some of the more obvious forms of trickery and demagoguery.”

FILM

SALGADO

CULTURE AND INDUSTRY

• http://www.openculture.com/2014/09/iles-davis-grace-jones-adam-ant-devo-in-honda-ads.html