“Shakespeare, Rembrandt, and Beethoven will all make films,” Abel Gance proclaimed in 1927, remarking on the advent of motion picture. “All legends, all mythologies, and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions… await their exposed resurrection.”
Walter Benjamin replies less enthusiastically: “To an ever greater degree, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”
A subtle but crucial observation. With easy reproducibility, how we think of art and what we use it for changes. In a new era of reproducibility, this time through infinite derivation, when anyone can generate a Shakespeare-ish sonnet or Beethoven-ish sonata, the originals must change, too: they are just source material for a sought-after moonlight mood, a phrase well-turned.
Something special about humanity, perhaps the most special thing, is going the way of hors