Aesthetics Phil 3100.

001 Andrew Aguirre 10/14/2013 424 Words The Benefits and Dangers of Reproduced Art Benjamin described the distinction between art within the cult and exhibitionist art. He claimed that the aura, or authentic and ceremonial experience, of cult art fades away as modes of reproduction introduce different perspectives of art. First, one must understand the difference between cult art and exhibition art, and after that one can compare the benefits and dangers of the death of cultish authenticity within reproductive art. The cult form of art and exhibition form of art differ because one contains an original experience while the other brings upon the diminishment of that experience. Cult art is any original form of artistic expression that contains a ritualistic experience. Consider the example of a major league baseball game. First, professional baseball games use exhibitionist forms of art like a large display screen, but the ritualistic experience is the point. Any reproduction of a baseball game cannot accurately depict the experience of watching the baseball game in the stadium. The difference between a baseball game in the stadium and a televised game is activity and passivity. If a foul ball is hit to a patron of the stadium, he or she must act and experience the ritual of the game. The viewer of a televised game is not as connected to the experience of being part of the ritual. The exhibitionist form of art, which is represented as the televised baseball game, delivers an artifact that possesses practically no ritualistic experience. The benefit of reproducing art is the survival of the artifact. Although the ritualistic experience has decayed because of artistic reproduction, the artifact itself has survived. For example, people now dont know what it feels like to be a nomadic hunter, but we are aware of their capabilities because of their cave drawings. The experience itself is gone, but the art has survived which isnt a bad thing. Also, our class discussed the fallacy of intention. We may not know why previous artists like cave men created art, but it would be fallacious to jettison past art pieces because we cant share the artists experience. The danger of reproducing art is that the experience of the piece is dead. We extract benefits from reproducing art, but we are disconnected from the experiences that inspired previous artists. This is a danger because, despite the significance we see in reproduced art, we probably wont ever fully understand the artifacts of the past. Although we value and save cult art, the exhibitionist art gives us an imperfect glimpse of peoples experiences.