Essay Draft 3 !

 

In this essay, I offer a detailed critical analysis of Warhol's Mona Lisa ( Figure 1)using Walter Benjamin's ' Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction'. I will outline first the wider context of the terms art reproduction and appropriation, then sketching their relationship to industrialisation and modern art and finally offering my own views as an art student.
 
There is no denying that a reproduction is not the same as the original artwork. During my recent visit to Paris , I went to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa.( Figure 2) I stood there looking at the painting long and hard to somehow feel its authenticity, it's aura, this painting of Lisa del Giocondo by Leonardo da Vinci was the entire basis of her fame.The Mona Lisa has been one of the most reproduced images as it has been used in advertising, consumer products and art history. One of the foremost examples is Duchamp's rendering of a moustache and goatee on a cheap postcard size reproduction of the Mona Lisa which saw the beginning of the 'readymade reproduction'.( Figure3) There are many other artists who made Mona Lisa's incarnation. Warhol was one of them. These reproductions made the meanings of art ambiguous.
 
Pop artist Andy Warhol recognised the fact that the Mona Lisa was as famous as the celebrity Marilyn Monroe and as such fame was a commodity and that endless replications of the celebrity's face made it so. Warhol adapted a technique from commercial printing, in which a photographic image could be transferred to a canvas by pushing paint through a silkscreen. Warhol made numerous copies in various colours and sizes, these copies can be deemed as appropriation of art.
 'All my images are the same, but very different at the same time... Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?'(Bockris,V. 1989: 326)
Nobody can mistake Warhol's Mona Lisa as the Renaissance original, thus proving that art appropriation can be just as legitimate. Warhol’s prints were numbered with the lowest numbers being the most valuable as if retaining the idea of the ‘aura of the original’ as described by Walter Benjamin.

 With industrialisation and modern technological means of reproduction the relationship between art and the masses changed. Knowledge concerning the art of the past can now reach a larger proportion of the world’s population. However this mechanisation not only brings about autonomy of the art but also undermines or rather dispels the aura of fine art as quoted by Walter Benjamin
 'Reproductive technology, we might say in general terms, removes the thing reproduced from the realm of tradition. In making[...]it actualizes what is reproduced'. ( Benjamin,W.2008:7)
Benjamin identifies the effect of mechanisation as progressive. The merger of creative and cultural industries would open the arts to a wider audience.
Benjamin's ideas have been reiterated in the past by writers as Malraux whose theory of museum-without-walls can be summarised as an imaginary museum of images that have been reproduced and are made universally available to any individual at all times.(Walker,John A.1983:70) These reproductions give an impression of homogeneity of artworks which are originally more disparate than they appear in reproduction. Whilst I acknowledge these theories are from the past but the essence of this idea still holds true.

Contrary to this Adorno has argued....

As I reflect on both sides of the argument