King Kriggle Benjamin for 2/9/10

Well here at first it seemed as though we had yet another crazy dude who wanted to overcomplicate things specifically for the reason so that people like me, who are but mere neophytes when it comes to art, cant understand a word he is getting at. Yet upon further examination, and a nice 10 minute break from the madness, I kept coming back to numbers 1 &2 on his list. The way that Benjamin speaks about “In principle a work of art has always been reproducible” (Benjamin 19). I find this a little hard to believe, I mean I think at the base of it he is speaking in the most rudimentary sense, in saying that the actual image can be reproduced, and then goes on to say the things that come along with it such as time period and emotions cannot be reproduced, I still find this to be false. Take a movie for example, the movie can be copied onto a DVD or a Bluray and made to be more clean and dynamic, but if it was an old VHS perhaps the gritty aspect of it added to the film, much like the “working version” of Blade Runner did for sci-fi fans. Well anyway I just think that simply printing something off will never be the same as the actual original, and I am almost positive the man agrees with me, it just seemed a lot more running around the bush than needed. When he moved on to say that the “presence in time and space” (Benjamin 20) was the thing that was lacking. I am in full agreement with the crazy man now. I find this to be completely true. Once again returning to movies, when Spiderman first came out it was pandemonium at the box office, thus making it the greatest release of all time. When you finally crowded into the theatre you could practically feel the person behind you breathing on you, but you still were so enthralled with the movie that you didn’t care. Later when it came out on DVD those awesome action scenes never did put the same twitch in your spine anymore, the magic was gone just as soon as it came to you in the theatre. Bottom line the man had a lot right, but once again went about saying it the wrong way in my humble 22 year old opinion