Since its publication in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s Artwork” essay has become a canonical text about the status and place of the fine arts in modern mass culture. Benjamin was especially
concerned with the ability of new technologiesnotably film, sound recording, and photographyto reproduce works of art in great number. Benjamin could not have foreseen the explosion of
imagery and media that has occurred during the past fifty years.
Does Benjamin’s famous essay still speak to this new situation? That is the question posed by the editors of this book to a wide range of leading scholars and thinkers across a spectrum of
disciplines in the humanities. The essays gathered here do not hazard a univocal reply to that question; rather they offer a rich, wide-ranging critique of Benjamin’s position that refracts
and reflects contemporary thinking about the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of life in the digital age.
