Read the Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction'. Write a 300 word analysis of one work of
Graphic Design, that you think relates to the themes of the text, and
employing quotes, concepts and terminology from the text.
Walter Benjamin, in his Marxist theory of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, takes the view that, the role of art in the modern world has changed. There was a shift from a time when only the rich used to create and buy art- 'craft of the beautiful' - an old fashioned idea. In the age of print, art could be much more easily reproduced so that different classes of people began to have their own opinion on it. Once the Guttenberg press was built, the world was never the same- art & design became more accessible en masse, books were printed on a huge scale- this educated the masses and democratised language. A contemporary example of mechanical reproduction would be 'Keep calm and carry on' wartime morale effort. The substructure of the understanding of art has been affected socially from something that was supposed to boost morale in the Second World War to something with no aura and essentially no communication of a message of any form. It has become a 'gimmick'. On the webpage, the designer has tried to reproduce the aura of the wartime poster through stained, old looking paper, with the headers in the form of a historical document file. This is ironic seeing as the physical posters were naturally distressed because it was in the War, whereas the digital version has been made to look distressed to retain the aura of the original design and their context. The 'Keep calm and carry on 'family' of designs have become 'detatched from domain of tradition', being reproduced in / on / with a multitude of different medias. The meaning of the campaign has changed, there has been a constant 'decay of its initial aura' because it has tried so hard to keep its aura through extremely transparent designs.
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