Pre Modern Art

In the pre-modern era, most art in society maintained its original form in a central location, where people would congregate to gain exposure to that form of media. In contrast, most media of the modern age is widely circulated, and seen by large numbers of people worldwide, due to the use of mechanical reproduction and digital distribution. This wide circulation of reproduced media in the modern era and the influence of media on human experience is explored by Walter Benjamin in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Through the ideas presented in this work and observations of real-life examples, one will determine that media has informed experience in the modernity through the mass production of replications

Before modernity, art and media was reproducible, but was never mass produced to the extent to which it is today. Woodprints, for example, were reproducible forms of media in the pre-modern era. Unlike the reproduction of today, this form was a manual reproduction, and Walter Benjamin writes, “Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as forgery, the original preserved all its authority, not so vis à vis technical reproduction” (Benjamin 39). Here, Benjamin is trying to show the importance of one having access to an original form of a reproducible piece of media and awareness of the fact that the media at hand is a reproduction. During the reproduction of an original composition, the producer may make changes to the original and may try to communicate to the audience that the changes made were,

Due to this difficulty, the audience often takes the reproductions as truth, even if certain aspects do not reflect the reality of the original form. This mass circulation and reproduction of media has allowed larger and more diverse audiences to have access to media in the modern era. This increase in audience has inspired producers of media to use their art as a platform to communicate their opinions to the public and to cater to certain political agendas, a practice which continues in today’s