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Part of the book: The Integrity of the Avant-Garde

Peter Zusi

Visual Culture 2

Legenda

ModernCzechArtopen

Abstract.  A striking number of the main claims in Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Era of its Technological Reproducibility’ can be found either explicitly or implicitly in Teige’s writings from the early and mid-1920s. This chapter explores these parallels, not in order to claim primacy for Teige but rather to move away from the common emphasis on the ‘Work of Art’ essay as having invented such liquidationist claims. Rather than a prognosis of a future ‘vanishing of the aura’, the chapter presents Benjamin’s essay as a diagnosis of his own present moment, for which the ‘vanishing of the aura’ can be understood as a ‘wish image’ or elusive ideal rather than forecast of the future.

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