The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

If you're trying to figure out your marketing, listen to Ray's interview with Stephen Grass, because Stephen Grass is the way his mind works is genuinely brilliant when it comes to marketing.

I mean, the man started a brand that he called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction after a Walter Benjamin essay.

I don't think that one worked,

but

And it's, and you kind of also wrote the sort of, uh, you know, kind of gave John a sense of how the four episodes might work together as well as sort of inserting the Walter Benjamin because Walter Benjamin, the text that they are riffing on is often translated as the work of art.

And the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Benjamin is talking about how art has changed by its ability to be photographically reproduced and John is updating it for an era in which it can be televisually reproduced and it now has this life on the internet as something you know it's on YouTube no doubt on the same channel in which people are watching this and people it has become this people are doing two ways of seeing in the era of the internet what people were doing what John was doing to Walter Benjamin

Yeah.

Well, I, I, I think that's for perhaps not even a bit of speculation because at the very least part of what was going on this, this reproduction was happening whilst John was alive.

Walter Benjamin, I'm mispronouncing his name, but it looks like Benjamin to me, Benjamin, he's a German guy, lived in France in the 1930s.

He wrote an essay called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

And he was saying that since mass media has become so cheap, it's rare to go and see the painting first before you see the picture.

You might see a painting on the way to the Mona Lisa that you haven't seen in the picture first, but it's basically celebrity worship, that you're affirming what you've seen in another medium.