2. Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

A. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the

total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another

practice - politics. Section IV

B. The film responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the "personality"

outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry,

preserves not the unique aura of the person but the "spell of the

personality," the phoney spell of a commodity. Section X

C. Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that...permitted it to reproduce all

transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the

public. Section XII

D. [N]othing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different

manifestations - the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its

traditional form. Section XII