The Spanish filmmaker Eugenio Monesma has dedicated his life to capturing the traditions of his homeland and its surrounding areas. He began his career by first taking up a Super‑8 camera at age 25 back in the nineteen-seventies, and in the decades since, his mission has taken him to the furthest corners of Spain and beyond in search of ever-older ways to preserve in detail. This places his work in the tradition of the anthropological or ethnographic documentary. But in a still-unconventional move in his field, he’s united the old with the new by creating his own Youtube channel on which to make his documentaries free to watch around the world.
Launched in 2020, Monesma’s channel has become a surprising hit. At the top of the post you can watch its most popular video, his short 1997 documentary on the making of combs from animal horns — which, as of this writing, has racked up nearly 8.5 million views. This happens to be one of the productions that took him beyond Spain’s borders, if only just: to the French village of Lesparrou, specifically, which maintained its small horn comb factories until the end of the twentieth century.
Their process is narrated in the immaculate Spanish diction of Monesma himself, but you can also take your pick of subtitles in more than a dozen other languages. Other of his documentaries that have become popular on Youtube include documentaries on the traditional making of cheese, silk, wine, pottery, honey and wax, knives, and leather.
Many of these videos run under twenty minutes; some reach nearly feature length. All of them satisfy a desire, which now seems widely felt among viewers of Youtube, to witness thoroughly analog processes that have been in use, changing and evolving only gradually, for long stretches of history.
And the fact that the things made so often look delicious certainly doesn’t make Monesma’s work less compelling: take, for example, the artisanal churros of Pamplona’s Churrería de la Mañueta, whose appeal is surely universal. In Korea, where I live, the past decade has a fad for churros elaborately coated and topped with colors and flavors unknown to tradition, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious what Monesma would have to say about it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Duke Ellington has been commemorated in a variety of forms: statues, murals, schools, and even United States commemorative stamps and coins. In his lifetime he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Légion d’honneur. His posthumous honors even include a Special Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1999, the centennial year of his birth. 34 years earlier, in 1965, he’d been named for–but ultimately denied–a regular Pulitzer Prize for Music, a decision his appreciators are now trying to reverse.
“The jury that judged the entrants that year decided to do something different,” writes jazz critic Ted Gioia. “They recommended giving the honor to Duke Ellington for the ‘vitality and originality of his total productivity’ over the course of more than forty years.” This broke from tradition in that the Pulitzer Prize for Music usually honors a single work: in 1945 it went to Aaron Copland for his ballet Appalachian Spring; in 1958 it went to Samuel Barber for his opera Vanessa; in 1960 it went to Elliott Carter for his Second String Quartet.
Alas, “the Pulitzer Board refused to accept the decision of the jury, and decided it would be better to give out no award, rather than honor Duke Ellington. Two members of the three-person judging panel, Winthrop Sargeant and Robert Eyer, resigned in the aftermath.” Ellington, for his part, reacted to this unfortunate development with characteristic equanimity: “Fate is being kind to me,” he told the press. “Fate doesn’t want me to be famous too young” — to which Gioia adds that “he was 66 years old at the time, and in the final decade of his life.”
In an effort to retroactively award Ellington his Pulitzer Prize for Music, Gioia has has launched an online petition. If you sign it, you’ll join the likes of John Adams, Michael Dirda, Steve Reich, and Gene Weingarten, all Pulitzer winners themselves, as well as other luminaries and enthusiasts who’ve voiced their support — nearly 9,000 of them as of this writing. “We assume that Pulitzers are awarded to work that qualifies as for the ages, that pushes the envelope, that suggests not just cleverness but genius,” writes the New York Times’ John McWhorter. “There can be no doubt that Ellington’s corpus fits that definition.”
Reversing the committee decision of 1965, Gioia writes, would enhance “the prestige and legitimacy of the Pulitzer — and every award needs that nowadays, when many have grown skeptical about our leading prizes.” What’s more, “it’s the proper thing for the music — because every time genuine artistry is recognized it sets an example for the present generation, and lays a foundation for the future.” In recent decades, the aesthetic range of Pulitzer-honored music has widened considerably: McWhorter points as an example to 2018’s winner, Kendrick Lamar’s album Damn. It could be that, as far as Ellington is concerned, it’s taken the rest of us 57 years to catch up with him. Sign the petition here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Everyone has been agog over the first photos from the James Webb telescope, and for good reason. “These images,” Rivka Galchin writes at The New Yorker, “carry news about the early universe, the birth and death of stars, the collision of galaxies, and the atmosphere of exoplanets.” They’re also “very, very pretty,” she writes, comparing them to Vermeer.
The clarity and levels of detailed information about the earliest galaxies have even astonished astronomers, whose work has advanced rapidly alongside the growth of the photographic medium. It was an astronomer, in fact – Johann Heinrich von Madler – who first coined the word “photography” in 1839. “Astronomers quickly embraced the use of photographic plates because of their good resolution and the ability to make much larger images,” APS Physics News notes.
Astrophotography properly began in 1840, when John William Draper, a British-born chemist and doctor, took the image above from the roof of the New York University observatory, credited as the first daguerreotype of the Moon. Daguerre himself might have taken an 1839 image, but it was likely destroyed in a fire, as were Draper’s attempts of the previous year, which burned up in a NYU blaze in 1865.
By all accounts, however, these earlier attempts at Moon photography were blurry and unfocused, showing little detail of the Earth’s satellite. Draper’s lunar “portrait,” from 1840, at the top, is largely considered “the world’s first true astrophoto,” writes Jason Major at Lights in the Dark, for its levels of detail and high contrast, comparatively speaking. As Scott Walker writes:
Draper set out to try and improve on Daguerre’s breakthrough by increasing plate sensitivity and reducing exposure times.… His advancement in the technique allowed visualization of craters, mountains and valleys on the moon’s surface which previously couldn’t be captured.
Splotched, spotted, and heavily degraded, the image may not look like much now, but a contemporary of Draper described it then as “the first time that anything like a distinct representation of the moon’s surface has been obtained.”
The achievement was inspirational, and many better attempts soon followed in rapid succession as the medium evolved. In 1851, photographer John Whipple and father-and-son astronomers William and George Bond improved on Draper’s process and made the Moon daguerreotype further up through the Great Refractor Equatorial Mount Telescope at the Harvard College Observatory. (The year previous, Draper himself collaborated with Bond père to make an image of the star Vega). The image caused a “veritable furor,” Smart History notes, at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Between 1857 and 1862, astrophotographer and amateur astronomer Warren De La Rue made a series of stereoscopic Moon images (lovingly preserved online by astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May), one of which you can see further up. De La Rue had seen Whipple’s daguerreotype at the Great Exhibition and began innovating his own process for creating stereoscopic astrophotographs. At the same time, Draper’s son, Henry, “an accomplished astrophotographer and one of the most famous American astronomers of his day,” Kiona Smith writes at Forbes, had taken over his father’s Moon photography project. See an 1863 image taken by the younger Draper just above.
“Before the invention of photography,” notes APS News, “astronomers had to sketch what they saw in their telescopes by hand, often missing crucial details.” Daguerre and Draper’s innovations, and those that came soon afterward, “showed them a far superior method was possible.” It is astonishing that these results could be achieved only a few decades after the first photograph, taken in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce. It is maybe even more astonishing that only a century and a half or so later — a meaningless drop in the cosmic timescale — astrophotography would look beyond the moon to the very origins of the universe itself.
Birds are the original musicians. This, at least, is a premise of the Audubon Society’s Birdsong Project, “a movement inspiring bird conservation through art.” There could thus be no more natural art form in which to celebrate our fine feathered (and in many cases, now endangered) friends than music, which the Birdsong Project has commissioned for its first release, and in no small quantity. They’ve so far put out the first two volumes of For the Birds, which in its totality will involve “more than 220 music artists, actors, literary figures, and visual artists, all coming together to celebrate the joy birds bring to our lives” — and remind us of “the environmental threats we all face.”
Those contributors include Yo‑Yo Ma, Elvis Costello, and Beck, whose work on For the Birds you can hear in the videos in this post. And in the case of Yo-Yo Ma, who performs a piece called “In the Gale” (by composer Anna Clyne), you can see him play not in a concert hall but out in the midst of genuine nature.
This underscores what’s heard brightly and clearly on the recording: that Ma and Clyne were just two of many collaborators on the track, the others being what sound like a forest full of birds. Other artists take different approaches: Beck’s “Archangel” is a lush studio soundscape, and Costello combines his own “The Birds Will Still Be Singing” with “And Your Bird Can Sing,” the most appropriate Beatles cover imaginable (apart from “Blackbird,” at least).
Organized by Randall Poster, by day a music supervisor for filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese, For the Birdsalso features music from, Jarvis Cocker, The Flaming Lips, Kaoru Watanabe, Stephin Merritt, and Seu Jorge. And those are just the contributors known primarily for their music: others involved in the project include Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton, and Jonathan Franzen. You can now stream the first two volumes on most major services, and pre-order the full 20-LP box set that will contain the material musical and literary from all five volumes, the last of which is scheduled to come out this September. Give it a listen, and afterward you’ll perhaps find yourself that much more able to appreciate the avian symphony conducted all around us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Tokyo once had a hotel by Frank Lloyd Wright. Such an architectural asset, one might assume, would be preserved at all costs, yet this one was demolished in 1967. But the fact that Wright’s Imperial Hotel stood for only 45 years won’t surprise anyone familiar with Japanese building culture, nor will the fact that it was only one of a series of Imperial Hotels that have occupied the same site. As evidenced by the Ise Grand Shrine, which has been demolished and rebuilt every twenty years since the eighth century, a structure’s value in Japan has nothing to do with its longevity. Still, this explanation may not satisfy Wright enthusiasts, the great majority of whom have only been able to see the master’s most famous Japanese building in photographs, diagrams, and postcards.
Just this year, the Frank Lloyd Trust has given us a way to experience it as nobody could in its heyday: a virtual tour video “shot” from the perspective of a flying drone. (Watch above.) It comes as an entry in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Lost Works, which “brings Wright’s demolished and unrealized structures to life through immersive digital animations reconstructed from Wright’s original plans and drawings, along with archival photographs.”
Here we have Wright’s East-meets-West masterpiece reconstructed just as it must have looked when it opened on September 1st, 1923 — the same day, coincidentally, as the Great Kantō earthquake that devastated Tokyo. The Imperial Hotel took some damage, but came through intact.
A lesser earthquake had already struck the previous year, but it left the hotel unharmed despite its still being under construction. (The same can’t be said of the fragile remains of the original Imperial Hotel, built in 1890 and gutted by fire in 1922, that Wright had been commissioned to replace.) But over subsequent decades, time took its toll in other ways: “the Wright-designed Imperial would eventually be considered by the post-war traveler to be dark and musty,” writes Steve Sundberg at Old Tokyo, “and its un-air-conditioned rooms too small. The hotel’s foundation, too, had by then settled unevenly into the soft subsoil; its long hallways and corridors came to have a wavy, rubbery appearance about them.”
Even when new, the Imperial Hotel had its discomforts: Sundberg quotes a 1925 Far Eastern Review article calling it “a hundred years ahead of the age in its architectural features and fifty years behind in many things which make for the comfort of its patrons.” Wright “sacrificed everything to his art, raising a monument to his genius and bequeathing to the Japanese the difficult task of making it a financial success.” It was financial exigencies, in part, that motivated its demolition and replacement with a third, high-rise Imperial Hotel in 1967 — whose own impending demolition and replacement was announced just last year. France-based Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane has produced a design for the fourth Imperial Hotel; what tribute, if any, it pays Wright’s legacy we’ll only find out when it opens in 2036.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
It’s nearly impossible to communicate musicianship in words, though there are rare, successful literary attempts by greats like James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, and jazz critic Ira Gitler, whose phrase “sheets of sound” so well captured the experience of Coltrane’s improvisational style in the late 50s. Maybe the free movements of jazz are easier to write about than other forms.…
When it comes to recently departed funk/pop/rock/R&B great Prince, it feels like there’s enough written about his prodigious talent that it begins to sound like overpraise. The most interesting tributes come from fellow musicians. Yet even their comments seem exaggerated.
Prince “played everything,” said Stevie Wonder soon after the Purple One’s sudden death – every style, every instrument – which seems like an impossible feat until you read the notes for his debut album and realize that, yes, he did play everything, before he hit 20… and listen to the full range of his output to see that, yes, he “could play classical music if he wanted to,” as Wonder said. “He could play jazz if he wanted to….”
Prince’s drummer Hannah Welton, who joined him in 2012, had similarly overblow-sounding praise, saying in a recent drum instruction video, “I don’t know that I ever heard an off note.” Everyone has an off day sometime, right? Too little sleep, a head cold, too much to drink… or whatever…. No musician could always be a hundred percent on, could they?
Listening to the funk/jazz jam sessions above recorded in 1977, when Prince was only 19 and on the threshold of releasing his first studio album, I’m inclined to cast off any remaining doubt that he was as untouchably disciplined and talented a musician as they say all of the time, even in behind-the-scenes rehearsals and jam sessions when, as Welton jokes, he seemed more interested in playing ping pong. If anyone embodied genius…
But there is a problem with that word (a word legendary music teacher Nadia Boulanger and onetime Quincy Jones mentor disliked). Prince might agree. Musical greats come out of great musical communities. Prince may have been the most proficient multi-instrumentalist of his time, but he consistently played with those who had no trouble keeping up with him, including early bass player André Cymone and longtime Revolution drummer Bobby Z.
Cymone and Z joined Prince in the Loring Park rehearsal room of Owen Husney, Prince’s first manager, to record these impromptu sessions. They are indeed “a must-listen for any fan!,” as Live for Live Music writes, and anyone else. “These eight instrumental tracks sound more like well-crafted compositions rather than the improvised jams that they are.” Prince, of course, switches up instruments, playing keys, guitar and bass and drums at times.
That it’s hard to tell when he’s playing what speaks not only to his own prowess but to that of his fellow musicians. As Bobby Z says in an interview for the Grammys, the biggest misunderstanding about Prince is “that he wasn’t human. That he was this mythical, immortal character. In the early days, he was a band member. He was the leader, of course, but he had to be in a band.” He was vocal in interviews about how playing with the hottest musicians in Minneapolis as a teenager gave him his early training.
Prince learned as much from others as they learned from him, says Z, soaking up everything he heard. “He was a fan. He loved being impressed by songs. He loved music. He loved other people’s talent.” But at the same time, he was still Prince, a rare talent without real equal. The Loring Park sessions may feature “instrumentals only,” notes Okayplayer, glancing at Prince’s compositional brilliance and showing off none of his vocal chops. Nonetheless, “it’s an intimate and terribly funky lens into P’s proficiency on damn-near every instrument,” before he’d even begun “his path to bonafide stardom.”
Despite having recently begun to admit tour groups, Japan remains inaccessible to most of the world’s travelers. Having closed its gates during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the country has shown little inclination to open them up again too quickly or widely. The longer this remains the case, of course, the more intense everyone’s desire to visit Japan becomes. Though different travelers have different interests to pursue in the Land of the Rising sun — temples and shrines, trains and cafés, anime and manga — all of them are surely united by one appreciation in particular: that of Japanese food.
Wherever in the world we happen to live, most of us have a decent Japanese restaurant or two in our vicinity. Alas, as anyone with experience in Japan has felt, the experience of eating its cuisine anywhere else doesn’t quite measure up; a ramen meal can taste good in a California strip mall, not the same as it would taste in a Tokyo subway station.
At least the twenty-first century affords us one convenient means of enjoying audiovisual evocations of genuine Japanese eateries: Youtube videos. The channel Japanese Noodles Udon Soba Kyoto Hyōgo, for instance, has captivated large audiences simply by showing what goes on in the humble kitchens of western Japan’s Kyoto and Hyōgo prefectures.
Hyōgo contains the coastal city of Kobe as well as Himeji Castle, which dates back to the fourteenth century. The prefecture of Kyoto, and especially the onetime capital of Japan within it, needs no introduction, such is its worldwide renown as a site of cultural and historical richness. Right up until the pandemic, many were the foreigners who journeyed to Kyoto in search of the “real Japan.” Whether such a thing truly exists remains an open question, but if it does, I would locate it — in Kyoto, Hyōgo, or any other region of the country — in the modest restaurants of its back alleys and shotengai market complexes, the ones that have been serving up bowls of noodles and plates of curry for decade upon decade.
Ideally the décor never changes at these establishments, nor do the proprietors. The video at the top of the post visits a “good old diner” in Kobe to show the skills of a “hard working old lady” with the status of a “veteran cook chosen by God.” In another such neighborhood restaurant, located near the main train station in the city of Amagasaki, a “super mom” prepares her signature udon noodles. But even she looks like a newcomer compared to the lady who’s been making udon over in Kyoto for 58 years at a diner in existence for a century. Soba, tonkatsu, oyakodon, tempura, okonomiyaki: whichever Japanese dish you’ve been craving for the past couple of years, you can watch a video on its preparation — and make your long-term travel plans accordingly.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
In the original liner notes to Brian Eno’s founding document of Ambient music — 1978’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports — the artist explains that he named his genre after “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.”
In defining “environmental music,” Eno takes great pains to distinguish his new work from the makers of Muzak. Rather than recreating the familiar with instrumental schmaltz, and “stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty,” Ambient should stimulate listeners’ minds without disturbing or distracting them, inducing “calm and a space to think.” Rolling Stone at the time coined the derisive, but not wholly inaccurate, phrase “aesthetic white noise.”
Reverb Machine painstakingly shows in a deconstruction how Eno himself introduced as much uncertainty into the compositional process as possible. Music for Airports is not, that is to say, a composition, but layers of tape loops with snippets of recorded music. These loops he set running and “let them configure in whichever way they wanted to.” Acting as initial selector of sounds and engineer, Eno’s role as composer and player of the piece involved “hardly interfering at all,” he’s said.
How could such a composition translate to a traditional performance setting, in which musicians, elevated on a stage, play instruments for audience members who face them, listening intently? The situation seems antithetical to Eno’s design. And yet, somehow, the musicians who make up the Bang on a Can All Stars ensemble have made it work beautifully, performing Music for Airports’s first track, the nondescriptly named “1/1,” in an arrangement by the group’s Michael Gordon, above, for an appreciative audience at the San Diego Airport Terminal.
Bang on a Can is a group committed, like Eno, to “making music new.” Since 1987, they have (unlike Eno) done so in a live performance-based way, holding 12-hour marathon concerts, for example. These performances have included their rendition of Music for Airports in full. The Village Voice described a 2007 performance in New York City for hundreds of attentive fans as “beautiful,” a word that often gets applied to Eno’s masterwork of randomness. Eno himself described the results as “very, very nice,” and he’s maybe the last person to be surprised that a live performance of the first so-called Ambient record works so well.
“The interesting thing is that it doesn’t sound at all mechanical as you would imagine,” he wrote of these early tape loop experiments. “It sounds like some guy is sitting there playing the piano with quite intense feeling. The spacing and dynamics of ‘his’ playing sound very well organized.” See a quintet of “guys” just above — on cello, bass, keyboard, percussion, and guitar — recreate the mildly disjointed mood of standing around in the liminal space of an airport, for a crowd of people who, presumably, came there for the express purpose of hearing background music.
The name of Vincent Van Gogh is one of the very best known in the history of painting, and indeed the history of art. But that doesn’t mean the man himself enjoyed any success in his short lifetime. Though he was convinced that he was creating “the art of the future,” and seemingly right to believe it, the buyers of nineteenth-century European art didn’t see it quite that way. Consequently impoverished, Van Gogh had to resort to unconventional strategies to maintain his artistic productivity. Instead of professional models, for example, he hired peasants and people from the streets. And when he couldn’t paint them, he painted himself.
Van Gogh would also economize by re-using his canvases, a practice not unknown in his day. “However, instead of painting over earlier works,” writes Jordan Ogg at National Galleries Scotland, “he would turn the canvas around and work on the reverse.”
It seems he did this with the National Galleries Scotland’s own Head of a Peasant Woman, whose back side turns out to bear a hitherto unknown self-portrait hidden by “layers of glue and cardboard” for well over a century. X‑ray analysis has revealed “a bearded sitter in a brimmed hat with a neckerchief loosely tied at the throat. He fixes the viewer with an intense stare, the right side of his face in shadow and his left ear clearly visible.”
Even in its ghostly lack of detail, this face seems to be unmistakable. If it belongs to who we think it does, it will become the 36th known Van Gogh self-portrait. It would have been painted before 1884’s Head of a PeasantWoman, “during a key moment in Van Gogh’s career, when he was exposed to the work of the French impressionists after moving to Paris.” You can learn about the ongoing process of this lost self-portrait’s rediscovery in the video at the top of the post. Van Gogh expressed conviction that he was painting for later generations, but surely even he would be astounded at the excitement of twenty-first century curators about finding another of his self portraits — and one he saw fit to give the cardboard treatment at that.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Black History Month is February in the United States and Canada, and October in the United Kingdom and Europe. It may be July right now, but if you’re interested in a subject, there’s no reason not to get more deeply into it all year round. This is underscored by the opening, this month, of Getty Images’ Black History and Culture Collection. As Petapixel’s Matt Growcoot writes, it contains “30,000 rarely seen images of the Black diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States that date back to the 19th century,” drawing from the domains of “politics, sport, music, culture, military, and celebrity.”
There are, of course, an enormous number of photos filed under “American Culture,” which would itself be unimaginable without the contributions of the people documented. But the same could be said of the other side of the pond; hence the inclusion of a “Black British Culture” label as well.
Creating the Black History and Culture Collection involved more than just tagging photos. You can learn more about what went into it in the short video above, which includes the voices of collaborators like NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Deborah Willis and the University of Pennsylvania’s Tukufu Zuberi. The artist Renata Cherlise speaks of the value of the images of famous people, but also those of everyday life as it was lived in places and times like Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the nineteen-forties. Whether or not your own heritage is tied into this history, you stand to learn a great deal from it. As Zuberi put sit, “Black culture is the original human culture, so there is no culture that is alien to black culture. The future of black culture is the future of human culture. Let’s go.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art. Aura relates to the physical proximity between objects and their viewers. Its loss, Benjamin argued, was a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon caused by mass media’s imposition of distance between object and viewer, though it appears to bring art closer through a simulation of intimacy.
The essay makes for potent reading today. Mass media — which for Benjamin meant radio, photography, and film — turns us all into potential actors, critics, experts, he wrote, and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spectacle. Yet it retains the pretense of ritual. We make offerings to cults of personality, expanded in our time to include influencers and revered and reviled billionaires and political figures who joust in the headlines like professional wrestlers, led around by the chief of all heels. As Benjamin writes:
The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.
Benjamin’s focus on the medium as not only expressive but constitutive of meaning has made his essay a staple on communications and media theory course syllabi, next to the work of Marshall McLuhan. Many readings tend to leave aside the politics of its epilogue, likely since “his remedy,” writes Michael Jay — “the politicization of art by Communism — was forgotten by all but his most militant Marxist interpreters,” and hardly seemed like much of a remedy during the Cold War, when Benjamin became more widely available in translation.
Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic politics aside, his essay anticipates a crisis of authorship and authority currently surfacing in the investigation of a failed coup that includes Twitter replies as key evidence — and in the use of social media more generally as a dominant form of political spectacle.
With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.
Benjamin’s analysis of conventional film, especially, leads him to conclude that its reception required so little of viewers that they easily become distracted. Everyone’s a critic, but “at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” Passive consumption and habitual distraction does not make for considered, informed opinion or a healthy sense of proportion.
What Benjamin referred to (in translation) as mechanical reproducibility we might now just call The Internet (and the coteries of “things” it haunts poltergeist-like). Later theorists influenced by Benjamin foresaw our age of digital reproducibility doing away with the need for authentic objects, and real people, altogether. Benjamin himself might characterize a medium that can fully detach from the physical world and the material conditions of its users — a medium in which everyone gets a column, public photo gallery, and video production studio — as ideally suited to the aims of fascism.
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
The logical result of turning politics into spectacle for the sake of preserving inequality, writes Benjamin, is the romanticization of war and slaughter, glorified plainly in the Italian Futurist manifesto of Filippo Marinetti and the literary work of Nazi intellectuals like Ernst Junger. Benjamin ends the essay with a discussion of how fascism aestheticizes politics to one end: the annihilation of aura by more permanent means.
Under the rise of fascism in Europe, Benjamin saw that human “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” Those who participate in this spectacle seek mass violence “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.” Distracted and desensitized, they seek, that is, to compensate for profound disembodiment and the loss of meaningful, authentic experience.
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