We are now talking about 2008 and his work is not just timely, but powerful, important, clairvoyant, and necessary. He was so prescient, and mind you, Virginia, he was alive only until 1940. Here the editors have situated this essay as the cornerstone of a vast collection of writings that demonstrates what was revolutionary about Benjamin's explorations on media.
The visual arts morph into literature and theory and then back to images, gestures and thought. Anyone interested in the fate of art, perception, and culture in the industrialized world must welcome this collection of Benjamin's writings on media., The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media reflects Benjamin's most salient thoughts on media and on culture in general in their most realized form, still maintaining an edge under the skin of everyone who reads it. The antinomies and ambivalences in Benjamin's thinking, his efforts to explore the most extreme implications of opposing stances, are still invaluable for illuminating the contradictions in today's media environment. Harvard's new volume of the German cultural critic's writings on media offers as its title-piece an earlier, edgier incarnation-the second of three composed between 19-in a superior translation.Throughout The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Benjamin's startling, often oblique language reveals his subjects from unexpected angles.This volume amply demonstrates the keenness and ingenuity of Benjamin's intuitions at the dawn of modern media culture., In recent decades, Benjamin's essay on the work of art may have been quoted more often than any other single source in an astonishing range of areas - from new-left media theory to cultural studies, from film and art history to visual culture, from the postmodern art scene to debates on the future of art, especially film, in the digital age. Until recently, Walter Benjamin's seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, was available to English-speaking readers only in the version that appeared in the 1968 collection Illuminations.
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