Dada vs. Walter Benjamin What Value Does Dada Have in...

------------------------------------------------- Unit 7. ------------------------------------------------- Dada Vs. Walter Benjamin: What value does Dada have in context of Walter Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction? ------------------------------------------------- Martin Hannon ------------------------------------------------- Martin Newth ------------------------------------------------- B.A. Photography, Year 2. ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- I have often been attracted to both the visual aesthetic, critical standpoint and to some extent the theory of artists Hannah Hoch and Kurt†¦show more content†¦Although Walter Benjamin and Dada are contemporaneous, by the time Benjamin wrote his essay (1936), Dada was being purged from Germany by the political events concerning Hitler and the Nazi party, which considered Dada degenerative art. The year after the essay was published Dada was included along with many other forms of modern art in their Entartete Kunst (degenerative art) exhibition, which aimed to defame modernism as a conspiracy against German decency: Schwitters fled to Norway the same year, likewise, Walter Benjamin (being an assimilated Jew) had left Germany in 1932. For this reason, it is important to remember political context when examining Benjamins essay. ------------------------------------------------- He discusses his concerns with film are that ‘Quantity has now become quality’, that ‘the masses are looking for distraction whereas art calls for immersion’ and warns us that ‘reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in film its true means of exercise’ ------------------------------------------------- ‘Mankind, which in Homers time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, is now one for itself. It’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communsim responds by politicizing