Walter Benjamin Vs André Bazin

Walter Benjamin vs. André Bazin
ART 1234
Prof.:
More than twenty-five years separate and distinguish the writings of Walter Benjamin, a German Romantic scholar living and working before World WarII and André Bazin, a French writer and critic who established himself in the post war aftermath and up until the late 1950's. However, both men dedicated their lives towards the critisism andunderstanding of artistic expression, particularly in light of new visual technologies, such as photo-mechanical reproduction and cinematography.
Working each in their own life-time on what could becategorised as the ontological critic of “technically informed vision”, both authors were men of letters publishing extensively in academic circles as well as in popular reviews. Be it Benjamin's focus onthe “aura” of art or Bazin's poetic discourse surrounding painting and photography, both have left their mark on the theory and practise of art, not to mention the coming of age of Modernism.
In hisseminal text,“TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin studies the effects of new technologies on the history of art and human consciousness. He does this by suggestingthat the very possibility of accepting certain kinds of pictures of the world as real (be they photographic, filmic, or other wise), and not others, implies that new standards have been achieved formaking such determinations and that by relation the old standards have been supplanted. He further elaborates on how new methods of production (i.e. the mechanical arts) engender new means of judgingthe real. All of which he does in order to establish the premise that human perception, particularly optical perception, is in an ongoing state of evolution.
In his own fashion André Bazin also speaksof the evolution of art, however he does so in order to establish the primacy of the image, and the nature of art, while defining the role of the mechanical arts in society. In his introductory...