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Abstract
This essay is a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a classic text in critical theory and media studies. Appropriating Benjamin’s sentence, paragraph, and essay structures, the essay presents a series of theoretical reflections on the status of art during the current age of transmedia production. The essay seeks to contribute to a theory of contemporary art that moves beyond capitalist, and increasingly fascist, ideologies. As in Benjamin’s essay, this work is an effort to think dialectically about the contradictions that structure our contemporary moment, and therefore to formulate a socialist aesthetics.
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Notes
1 This essay is a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” also translated into English by Harry Zohn as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in the classic 1968 volume Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. I have based this rewrite on the “Second Version” of Benjamin’s essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” composed between December 1935 and February 1936, and I have used the translation by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Benjamin). At times, I have departed from the translation’s syntax and structure, and at other moments, I have retained the essay’s language as a way of following Benjamin’s dialectical movements, alongside the translators. This essay is an act of creative, critical appropriation.
2 In his 1986 work America, Baudrillard described this image-saturated world as “hyperreality”: “Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams, too” (28). This understanding of reality’s constructed nature is a central insight of postmodernism, from cyborgs and virtual reality to the existential sense of storytelling’s power articulated by Joan Didion in The White Album: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (11).
3 From Marshall McLuhan’s predictive “hot and cold media” and Henry Jenkins’s “convergence culture” to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “habitual new media,” media studies scholars have analyzed how the development of increasingly digital and networked media forms emerge as both individual practices and structural shifts in economics and social structures (Chun; Jenkins; McLuhan).
4 For examples of this process, see Connor and Kidman.
5 The originality of the work of art is incomprehensible to much media today, since so much of it is in the form of inherently reproducible digital files. Yet, the idea of ownership or, at least, of authorized use is dominant on the contemporary “platform economy” model, in which users pay copyright holders for access to their intellectual property (Srnicek).
6 Accounts of fan culture that consider the recent historical period of transmedia’s emergence are Salter and Blodgett, and Woo.
7 Writing about the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, Zeynep Tufekci diagnoses social media’s standardizing effect on global political movements: “If I squinted and ignored that the language was Turkish, I felt that it could have been almost any twenty-first century protest square: organized through Twitter, filled with tear gas, leaderless, networked, euphoric, and fragile” (xv).
8 See Butler; Crimp; Gilroy; and Jameson.
9 For an approach to Citizen Kane that blends these historicist and formalist understandings of the film, see Mulvey.
10 In April 2021, the movie website Rotten Tomatoes ranked the 2017 film Paddington 2 above Citizen Kane, based on critics' reviews. A transmedia production in an intellectual property franchise, the bear Paddington himself responded to the news, on his official Twitter account: “I do hope Mr Kane won’t be too upset when he hears I’ve overtaken him with rotten tomatoes” (@paddingtonbear). The IP monitors its own prestige.
11 For a list of entertainment franchises that gives a sense of both the breadth of cultural material and amount of capital circulating through representations of intellectual property, see “List of Highest-Grossing Media Franchises.”
12 See also Berman, a study that uses “all that is solid melts into air” as its title.
13 Sianne Ngai’s analyses of cuteness and the gimmick as formative elements of capitalist aesthetics are instructive for thinking about transmedia productions, which often rely on these two modes. Cuteness as an aesthetic mode “has the capacity not only to reflect and mystify power but also to reflect on and make use of powerlessness” (Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories 109). The gimmick has a similar dialectical movement: “The flip side of historically low unemployment rates is the rise of low-paid, precarious service jobs. The flip side of capitalist awe is the rise of the gimmick” (Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick 265).
14 The turn towards relational aesthetics and the contemporary interest in performance art retrospectives are both symptoms of a broader shift to participatory aesthetics, facilitated now by digital technologies. See Bourriaud and Bishop.
15 In a transmedia project like John Jennings and Stacey Robinson’s Black Kirby, comics artist (and Black Panther co-creator) Jack Kirby’s material is reworked into an Afrofuturist aesthetic. In so doing, the artists create the popular culture imagery that should circulate in a socialist utopia, enacting in aesthetics a political worldview (Jennings and Robinson). For an analysis of the 2018 Black Panther film, its aesthetics and its politics, see Bukatman.
16 As Amanda Lotz notes in her analysis of the proliferation of studio-based streaming platforms, streaming allows for “vertical integration” of a media company’s production and distribution, eliminating many expenses associated with older media distribution models:
From the perspective of the business interests of a media conglomerate, studio portals help maximize the value of intellectual property holdings by enabling a direct-to-consumer outlet that eliminates the stake external distributors receive, which is typically 20 to 40 percent of a retail transaction. (ch. 3)
17 For examples of the “high/low” divide in twentieth-century art and of its critique during postmodernism, see Huyssen, and Varnedoe and Gopnik.
18 For an account of video games as “affective systems,” see Anable.
19 As Catherine Zuromskis has documented, affordable cameras turned everyone into a photographer, thus lending the medium of photography a sense of intimacy that differs from its more technical uses. Digital cameras and later smartphones heightened our control over photographic technologies, while drawing from the emotional resonances of film-based snapshot photography: “by collapsing the acts of taking, viewing, and display into one, digital cameras highlight the collaborative nature of the snapshot that has always been central to its affective significance” (Zuromskis 315).
20 The film director Martin Scorsese made this point in his critique of superhero franchise films, which eliminate the element of artistic “risk” by displacing the director’s auteur role. In his account, “Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist” (Scorsese).
21 In her reading of Beyoncé’s 2016 Lemonade, Daphne A. Brooks chronicles how the transmedia project builds upon the history of both slavery and popular music, as Beyoncé “sings across the centuries” (442). This section notably concludes Brooks’s epic retelling of American music history.
22 One of the great theorists of medium specificity, Rosalind Krauss argued in 1999 that photography’s emergence as a legitimate art form had opened up new possibilities for politicizing aesthetics. In that account, she argues for “the need for the idea of the medium as such to reclaim the specific from the deadening embrace of the general.” This “idea of the medium as such” would resist the commodification of all media types accomplished by transmedia production (Krauss 305).
23 In the context of the United States today, for example, political affiliations are clearly connoted not just through television and radio options, but also by more mundane consumer choices regarding clothes and even food.
24 The range of gimmicky cinematic technologies, from quaking theater seats to 3D glasses, as well as the cultivation of the movie theater as a total experience, with a range of food, drink, and other entertainment options, signals the ways in which the film as an art object no longer sustains attention in and of itself as a spectacle, without a broader participatory context. The waning importance of film as an art object and its importance as a facet of transmedia production is predicted even in film studies scholarship, which has long associated the conditions of a film’s studio production with its aesthetic form. For an influential example, see Bordwell et al.
25 For example, the 2020 film Sonic the Hedgehog underwent extensive revision after fans responded negatively to a trailer. The revisions cost an estimated five million dollars and resulted in a three-month delay of the transmedia franchise film’s release. See Faughnder.