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MECHANICAL
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Technologies of CultureMechanical Reproduction
"…that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art…"- Walter Benjamin
"Mankind unsparingly uses every individual as material to heat its great machines; but what good are the machines when all individuals (that is mankind) serve only to keep them going?"- Friedrich Nietzsche
"For sketches of manners, for the portrayal of bourgeois life and the fashion scene, the quickest and the cheapest technical means will evidently be the best."- Charles Baudelaire
"To create is divine, to reproduce is human."- Man Ray
"There is nothing simple about representing a human being."- Atom Egoyan
"If our aestheticians never weary of asserting in Kant's favor that, under the spell of beauty, one can even view undraped female statues 'without interest,' one may laugh a little at their expense: the experiences of artists on this ticklish point are more 'interesting,' and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an 'unaesthetic man.'"- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Stealing things is a glorious occupation, particularly in the artworld."- Malcolm McLaren
"Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting."- Gertrude Stein
"The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction…The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal."- Jean Baudrillard
"For imitation affirms and sharpens its essence in effacing itself. Its essence is its nonessence. And no dialectic can encompass this self-inadequation. A perfect imitation is no longer an imitation. If one eliminates the tiny difference that, in separating the imitator from the imitated, by that very fact refers to it, one would render the imitator absolutely different: imitator would become another being no longer referring to the imitated. Imitation does not correspond to its essence, is not what it is- imitation- unless it is in some way at fault or rather in default. It is bad by nature. It is only good insofar as it is bad. Since (de)fault is inscribed within it, it has no nature; nothing is properly its own. Ambivalent, playing with itself by hollowing itself out, good and evil at once- undecidably, mimesis is akin to the pharmakon. No 'logic,' no 'dialectic' can consume its reserve even though each must endlessly draw on it and seek reassurance through it."- Jacques Derrida
"Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it.
Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning."- Martin Heidegger
"More than an invisible destruction of the work:a destruction of art, the proof that what we thought was linked to the infinite overabundance of life is so poor as to lend itself to repetition and not be betrayed by the empty permanence of mechanical reproduction."- Maurice Blanchot
"…Authenticity's wiped out when the uniqueness of every reality is overcome by the acceptance of its reproduction, so art is designed for its reproducibility. Give them the choice, Mr. Benjamin, and the mass will always choose the fake. Choose the fake, Mr. Huizinga! Authenticity's wiped out, it's wiped out Mr. Benjamin. Wiped out, Mr. Huizinga. Choose the fake, Mr. Benjamin. Absolutely, Mr. Huizinga! Positively Mr. Bejamowww!"- William Gaddis, Agape agape
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