I really struggled with today's reading. I opened the textbook and closed it about 5 times before I could finally get through the reading and even then I wasn't confident that I was understanding what Walter Benjamin wanted me to understand so I waited to blog until after class and I'm happy I did so because I have a clearer understanding now about some of the concepts discussed in the essay.
The takeaway I want to discuss and build on is the conversation we had about the following quote:
"The greater the decrease in social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion." (p. 45)
In class, we talked about how once something is acknowledged as "truly new" it no longer is new, which is the conundrum of modernism. This stuck out to me because it begs the question of what is and what isn't conventional; Taryn mentioned that the musical "In the Heights" was "truly new" when it originally came out, it was criticized for the portrayal of people of color and then in the movie remake, the movie was again acknowledged as "truly new" and criticized for a poor representation of people of color. This was interesting to me because it is the same musical but the change of format, from live to taped, gave birth to a new product open to criticism. It seems that this example follows what Benjamin spoke of, that reproduction follows the loss of aura. I believe this shift speaks loudly of the era in which each piece of art came out. The original came out in a time where white was the only correct and accepted way of being, whereas now there is much more open backlash to that notion so we hold art to a different degree. In both cases the expectations of each generation were betrayed by the musical, making it unconventional. If that's the case then I think it begins entering the world of postmodernism for the absurdity of this idea.
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