Certainly, he wouldn’t have produced it today (as a matter of fact, the original Fontaine was thrown away as rubbish, but thanks to photograpy, we still have an image of it!).īenjamin’s idea had been developed around 1935 while he was trying to escape from Hitler’s regime. Today we might not regard Marcel Duchamp’s Fontaine with the same eyes as someone that lived in 1917. Instead, the value of the artwork changes in time due to the change in cultural events and the ever changing popular taste. It creates a time and space collocation, that would define it as unique. The original artwork wouldn’t lose its importance because it has the Aura, a trait that ensures its uniqueness.
![john berger ways of seeing tumblr john berger ways of seeing tumblr](https://64.media.tumblr.com/6bf7269a5b7b46af3c84d1e1cf1dad09/tumblr_inline_p9mcm03xNj1rjfo1f_1280.png)
In a way, he already had a vision of where we are today with social media and the internet!
![john berger ways of seeing tumblr john berger ways of seeing tumblr](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5702ab9d746fb9634796c9f9/1597741503325-BEOSLT3D0E2ZJNPIFIOS/©+Lalla+Essaydi.png)
Today, images are spread over the globe through the internet, faster than ever. Photography and film reproduction could be enjoyed by everyone, this allowed cultural enrichment to become popular and accessible. He believed that an original artwork should be seen everywhere. In his book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he explained how mass reproducing works of art allows culture to spread to a broader audience, giving people easier access to knowledge. Benjamin changed the way we think about art, freeing artwork from its stereotypical uniqueness. Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was one of the most influential aesthetics philosophers of the twentieth century. That is precisely what happened on the 26th of September 1940, while war was devastating both Europe and humanity. He chose his own fate and overdosed on morphine instead of being deported to a concentration camp. He was trying to flee from European fascism through Spain and Portugal to get to the United States, when Francoist police told him and his fellow refugees that they would have to return to Germany. Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and art critic, killed himself to escape from Nazi repatriation.