“How artwork is viewed on the Internet”
Society today has rapidly changed to an unknown world with all the technology that has recently been blossoming. After reading “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, by Walter Benjamin, I realized how aura of the artwork truly is lost when surfing the Internet. When previously going on the Internet and completing research projects on artists and their works, I thought that the convenience of galleries on-line helped people to view art more easily and somehow appreciate it more. I agree with Benjamin when he states how “mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new” (77). I believe that aura is honestly lost because of reproduction of paintings. Nowadays anybody can go on their computers and Internet and view whatever they want to. Why go to a museum and study a painting when you can sit on a chair and see it on your monitor? Because of the how easily accessible the Internet is to people today, it causes people to lose the sense of how beautiful the artwork is and just see it as check your e-mail. I believe that the Internet imposes the population to perceive objects in another way. With this, technology produces new forms of art that are not diminished by their lack of aura, just con . . .
By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (79). Yet this was long ago and since then it has worsened. In addition, selected artists use a shading technique, which may appear blurry or dark on the screen. Even when viewing sculptures and such on the Internet, people do not get the true effect of the piece of art work. You do not experience the artwork if you are just sitting at your desk. Benjamin is absolutely correct by stating this point. As well, computers are two-dimensional. By surfing the Web, people are viewing a new form of artwork, which is unknowingly created on-line. By replication of artwork, one tends to lose this sense of aura. Everything you see on the Internet is a new creation because no one has viewed it that way before. When I go on-line and view art to purchase, I realized that it is a necessity to go and look at it in a store and see what it really looks like. Computers may be efficient, yet looking for artwork and such on the Internet does not give an accurate portrayal of the pieces. When on the Internet, people are actually viewing new forms of art that have been created from this technology. As stated in Benjamin’s essay, “one might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art… One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. There is a new object which is formed when viewing artwork on the web pages.
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