Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF ITS DIGITAL

DISTRIBUTION

Jean-Philippe Deranty & Michael J. Olson

To cite this article: Jean-Philippe Deranty & Michael J. Olson (2019) THE WORK OF
ART IN THE AGE OF ITS DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION, Angelaki, 24:5, 104-123, DOI:
10.1080/0969725X.2019.1655278

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1655278

Published online: 12 Sep 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 227

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cang20
 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 24 number 5 october 2019
Depeche Mode by Alexandru Manea.
introduction
P ower has always sought to represent itself,
whether to assert, defend, or justify its
authority. And counter-powers, whether they
were those of elites, particular institutions, or
popular movements, also use representations
to defend and justify their actions and to
garner support. In a very generic sense, politics
has always been aesthetic. The prodigious pro-
liferation of images, sounds, and texts in the
industrial era, however, has made them such
potent tools of ideological justification and par-
tisan enlistment that the old nexus between poli-
tics and aesthetics seems to have taken on a new
form. The catchphrase “aestheticized politics,”
which was coined by Walter Benjamin in a
famous essay of 1935, seems to capture a distinc-
tive feature of the twentieth century and its tota-
litarian tendencies. In recent years, the notion
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/19/050104-20 © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1655278
jean-philippe deranty
michael j. olson
THE WORK OF ART IN
THE AGE OF ITS
DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION
has risen to prominence once again. It seems a
particularly useful category to shed light on
the rise around the globe of political movements
channelling the fears of frightened and brutal-
ized polities, as the success of these movements
seems inextricably linked to their mobilizing the
power of conviction and impression inherent in
modern technologies of communication. Con-
temporary populism is the masterful child of
the internet and commercial television.
This paper seeks to explore further the notion
of “aestheticized politics,” with two aims in
view. The first is to bring some conceptual
clarity to the notion itself. This is a particularly
difficult challenge, notably because the two key
terms, “aesthetics” and “politics,” can take on a
104

variety of meanings. Secondly, we aim to
present a particular way of understanding the
notion of “aestheticized politics” that corre-
sponds to the features of our contemporary
predicament.
In order to fulfil these two aims, we return to
the founding text in the contemporary huma-
nities in which the category of “aestheticized
politics” was first defined, namely Benjamin’s
“The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility.”1 This text is most famous
for its application of the concept of “aura” to
cultural and political history, for its suggestive
diagnosis of the use of aesthetic means by the
then rising National-Socialist movement, and
for its even more suggestive proposal for an
alternative “politicized aesthetics” in a proletar-
ian revolution. Our exegetical wager, for which
we provide evidence in the first section of the
article, is that underneath the surface disjoint-
edness of Benjamin’s argument the text in fact
provides a model of systematic conceptual
analysis.2 It shows the range of key factors
that are at stake in the aesthetic valence and
the social relevance of expressive artefacts.
And it shows the range of functional relation-
ships between those factors that need to be
characterized. To name only a few, those
factors include: the technological mode of repro-
duction of expressive artefacts, the modalities of
creator–audience relationships, the value
created by artefacts in their historically specific
context, and the function they thereby fulfil in
those contexts. Our “structural” approach to
the text suggests that Benjamin’s text remains
the most useful heuristic model for understand-
ing what “aestheticized politics” means. While
many authors have sought to do justice to the
multiplicity of meanings of “aesthetics” and
“politics” in order to get a grip on “aestheticized
politics,” none has been able to achieve what
Benjamin did in his famous essay. This does
not mean that we follow Benjamin in the
detail of every one of his analyses.3 His
example has heuristic, not necessarily substan-
tive value. But if we want to do justice to the
richness of aesthetics and politics, and under-
stand the many levels at which they interact
today to produce their specific social, cultural,
105
deranty & olson
and political effects, Benjamin’s essay offers
an invaluable starting point, provided one does
that on this “structural” understanding of it.
After we have extracted the structural grid
that we think is at the heart of the text, in the
third section we use it as a heuristic reference
point to characterize our contemporary scene.
More concretely, we ask ourselves, for each
one of the key structural functions highlighted
by Benjamin, what it has been transformed
into with the shift from Fordist industrial tech-
nologies and associated mode of production, to
a post-Fordist, information-driven society and
economy. We make a series of proposals in
relation to each of one those key functional
factors, arguing that new information and com-
munication technologies create a framework in
which artefacts today seek to produce “invest-
ment value” by mobilizing the “attention” of
their audiences, which are no longer to be
thought as “masses,” as Benjamin argued, but
rather as “multitudes.” The function of the
“work of art in the age of its digital distri-
bution,” we claim, has become a social one
(Benjamin famously claimed the industrial age
had given the work of art a “political” func-
tion). In the fourth section we try to substanti-
ate our proposal by showing how the model we
build applies not just to artworks in the sector
of avant-garde art but also to the ways in
which social media giants are able to use novel
technological capacities for expression and
representation to invent new modes of valoriza-
tion. In the concluding section we show how the
new technological-economic framework deter-
mines the contemporary meaning of “aestheti-
cized politics.”
benjamin’s “the work of art in the
age of its technical reproducibility”
Anyone who has read it will testify to the diffi-
culty of coming to terms with the structure,
arguments, and even the central claims of Ben-
jamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technical Reproducibility.” He skips from ana-
lyses of ancient ritualistic uses of painting and
statuary to reflections on Hollywood movie
 the work of art
stars to the political goals of Dada and Futurism
with scant indication of the thread that holds
them all together. In this section we will
briefly advance an interpretation of the
Artwork essay that finds in it a highly struc-
tured, multidimensional account of the aesthetic
aspects of life in the early twentieth century. If
one attends to the many dimensions of aesthetic
experience Benjamin articulates and then charts
the ways he claims these dimensions determine
and constrain one another, a surprisingly sys-
tematic analytical framework underpinning the
essay shines through its impressionistic style.
It is the aim of this section to tease out that
analytical framework.
Our first task is to mark out the twelve
dimensions of “the aesthetic” Benjamin dis-
tinguishes in the course of his analysis, which
we will do by following the order in which he
presents them in the essay. The first dimension
of the work of art Benjamin addresses is the
process of its production. The essay is celebrated
for its analysis of the historical transition in the
production of art from almost exclusively
manual means to increasingly technical pro-
cesses of production and art’s consequent limit-
less reproducibility.4 This shift reached a
decisive moment when, he writes, “Around
1900 technical reproduction has reached a stan-
dard that not only permitted it to reproduce all
transmitted works of art and thus to cause a pro-
found change in their impact upon the public, it
also captured a place of its own among the artis-
tic processes.”5
The process of the production of an artwork
is intimately linked, as that passage indicates,
to a second dimension of the aesthetic, namely
the medium or the form of art. Painting, sculp-
ture, poetry, photography, and cinema are of
course produced by different means. In addition
to arguing that media have distinct character-
istics, Benjamin takes specific art forms to be
exemplary of different historical moments.
The exemplarity of specific art forms for par-
ticular historical epochs is an effect of those
forms’ ability to reflect and integrate central
characteristics of the age. Whereas painting or
sculpture encapsulates important dimensions
of pre-industrial art, he holds photography and
especially cinema up as emblematic of his own
historical moment.6 We will return to this idea
shortly.
The differences in production that underpin
distinct artistic media also determine important
differences in the ontology of works of art
belonging to those media. Paintings and sculp-
tures are by their nature singular objects
whose uniqueness generates interest in the auth-
enticity and provenance of the work. Prints,
photographs, and films, by contrast are created
by a process that “substitutes a plurality of
copies for a unique existence.”7 One print of a
film is no more or less authentic than another.
The distinction between inherently unique and
originally multiple works of art is the central
feature of Benjamin’s analysis of the ontology
of the work of art.8
The singularity or multiplicity of a work
bears directly on its accessibility to an audience
of viewers or consumers, and the audience of a
work is the fourth dimension of Benjamin’s
analysis of the work of art. By virtue of their
uniqueness, manually produced works have a
quantitatively limited audience: “painting
simply is in no position to present an object
of simultaneous collective experience.”9 The
widespread distribution and exhibition of
films, by contrast, makes their natural audience
what Benjamin calls without a hint of derision
“the masses.”10
That technically reproduced arts address
mass audiences where manually produced arts
find limited audiences leads Benjamin to articu-
late a pair of closely related aesthetic dimen-
sions: the value and the social function of the
work of art. In a broadly Marxist fashion, the
value of the artwork in any historical moment
describes a relation, that between the audience
and the work. Pre-industrial art, he explains,
is characterized by a “cult value,” which estab-
lishes a magical or religious distance between
the work and its audience. This distance is
essential to establishing the religious function
of pre-industrial art, the function of which
hinges on staging the transcendent authority
of divine and political figures through their dis-
tance from and ritual power over the commu-
nity. In contrast to this, Benjamin’s comments
106

about the exhibition value of mechanically
reproduced arts emphasize the closeness and
availability of modern media to their audiences.
By bringing the masses into close proximity
with artwork, cinema brings the masses face to
face with themselves in a way that awakens a
sense of their own agency. Thus, at the dawn
of the twentieth century the work of art begins
to stake out a political function.
In addition to these social dimensions of the
relation between audience and artwork, Benja-
min recognizes a number of more individual
aspects of how we relate to the aesthetic world.
As the etymology of the word indicates, aes-
thetic life is closely bound to perception or
aisthesis. “The mode of human perception,”
Benjamin observes, “changes with humanity’s
entire mode of existence.”11 The camera’s
ability to magnify small objects and to slow
down time affects the way we look at the
world, he argues. Cinematic editing juxtaposes
objects in a way that encourages a transitory
mode of perception accustomed to shuttling
between things rather than resting in a more
stable and permanent fashion on a single
image.12
How and what we perceive is linked to
another aspect of Benjamin’s analysis of aes-
thetic experience: how one approaches what is
visible in works of art, what he calls one’s aes-
thetic attitude.13 The relative permanence and
stability of manually produced artworks and
their ritualistic function invite a contemplative
and reverent attitude. One reflects on the
wisdom, virtue, or power depicted in pre-indus-
trial art. While watching a film, however, one’s
attention is pulled along from one object to
another such that one is distracted rather than
concentrated on a single image. This attitude
of distraction becomes active and productive
rather than passive when it meets with what
Benjamin calls a haptic or tactile mode of par-
ticipation with a work of art.14 The habit of
interpreting cinematic cuts between shots of
individuals speaking as a conversation rather
than as disconnected images is an instance of a
viewer connecting distinct elements of a work,
which is analogous to the way that inhabiting a
building establishes connections between
107
deranty & olson
different spaces within it. Putting the objects
that distract us into relation through this kind
of “tactile” mode of participation with the
object contrasts starkly with a viewer’s optical
mode of participation with paintings. Here
again, Benjamin emphasizes a distance
between viewer and artwork that establishes
the relative autonomy of the work and the pas-
sivity of the audience.
In the course of sketching the nine dimensions
of aesthetic experience we have just reviewed,
Benjamin touches on three more elements of
the work of art more tangentially connected to
his core concerns. The first, a classic theme, is
aesthetic judgment.15 The second is an even
older topic in philosophical reflections on art,
namely its representational or mimetic
quality.16 Finally, he touches on an issue more
familiar from Sigfried Kracauer by observing
that art forms give rise to their own demands
or needs.17 In this way, the technical advance
marked by photography already called out for
those of film, and sound film in particular.
The richness of the aesthetic theory Benjamin
outlines in the Artwork essay stems from more
than just the identification of the twelve dimen-
sions of aesthetic experience he sketches. As our
brief comments about these dimensions already
indicate, as soon as Benjamin distinguishes the
concepts clustered around the work of art, he
begins to chart the ways they determine, con-
strain, influence, and reinforce one another.
His analytical model for thinking about the his-
torical transformation of the work of art
includes, in addition to the twelve nodal con-
cepts we have just mentioned, more than
thirty relations or points of contact between
these nodes. Indeed, the complex network
of reciprocal relationships developed in the
Artwork essay provides a stunning illustration
of the method of inquiry Benjamin established
for his Arcades project. This method consisted
in considering relevant artefacts as “constella-
tions,” in which the “base” and “superstruc-
ture” of a historical period, and indeed the
historical layers to which that artefact gestures
(the tradition of suffering and the future of poss-
ible redemption), crystallize in hermeneutically
substantial and politically revealing fashion.18
 the work of art
A few examples of the network of relations
contained in Benjamin’s multidimensional
analysis will have to suffice here to illustrate
the richness of his method. Some of these con-
nections are familiar. The tools and technology
available to an artist will, of course, impact the
media through which she expresses herself,
influence the mimetic character of the work,
and whether the work is unique or reproducible.
But even as technology determines the media
available to artists and audiences, Benjamin
claims those media generate needs that in turn
affect technological development. Technological
modes of artistic production and art forms thus
reciprocally determine each other.
To take another example, the aesthetic atti-
tude invited by the dominant form of art in
any particular historical moment is closely con-
nected to the value form (i.e., cult or exhibition)
reinforced by the artwork on the one hand and
to the broader social function of art on the other.
And still another: the mimetic capacity of
dominant forms of art affects not only how
and what people perceive in the world but also
Fig. 1. A graph of the twelve senses of “the aesthetic” in Benjamin’s Artwork essay and the relations that
connect them.
the relative activity or passivity characteristic
of our attitudes toward the world. Mimetic accu-
racy made possible by the aesthetic technologies
of industrial modernity is accompanied by a
sense of accessibility, Benjamin argues, which
undercuts the distance separating audiences
from the represented world and underwrites a
sense of agency on the part of the viewer now
empowered with a clearer picture of how her
world works.
Benjamin lays out entirely too many relations
to discuss here.19 A visual graph of the twelve
dimensions of aesthetic experience and the
tangle of relations between them illustrates the
richness of Benjamin’s analysis well enough
for the time being. Figure 1 maps the twelve
dimensions of aesthetic life we have just sum-
marized and indicates the relations between
these dimensions that Benjamin charts. The
arrows illustrate relative activity, so that the
arrow from Art Form to Function, for
example, represents Benjamin’s claim that the
former actively determines the latter. Double-
headed arrows indicate that Benjamin describes
108

a relation of mutual influence between the two
dimensions they connect.
In addition to capturing the wealth of ideas
packed into the essay, Figure 1 reflects Benja-
min’s palimpsestic style. Aside from the pro-
grammatic framing provided by the brief
Preface and Epilogue, the logical structure of
the network of aesthetic concepts that the
essay seeks to analyse remains elusive. This
has led to the pervasive sense that the essay is
a work “whose significance derives from its
prognostic claims rather than from the logical
presentation of its ideas.”20 Of course, Benja-
min’s programmatic claims about the aesthetici-
zation of politics and his call for a politicization
of aesthetics to counter it have attracted no
shortage of attention. We are similarly attracted
to Benjamin’s comments about the relations
between “the political” and “the aesthetic.”
What distinguishes our analysis from those of
other interpreters, however, is that we find the
richest resources for thinking through these
relations and their historical developments in
the logical structure of the body of Benjamin’s
analysis rather than in the framing remarks of
the Preface and Epilogue.
Though the impressionistic style of Benja-
min’s writing makes it difficult to discern, a
visual representation of the concepts and
relations addressed in the essay can help us see
there is a more robust conceptual architecture
at work than it first appears. Figure 1 supports
a number of interesting observations. For
example, Benjamin describes ways in which
the modes of production of works of art
impact eight of the other eleven dimensions of
“the aesthetic” and is in turn affected by four
of the eleven. As this measure, the title of the
essay, and the bulk of scholarly attention indi-
cate, the production and reproduction of art-
works are concepts central to the essay.
However, that the essay describes ways in
which an artwork’s audience actively deter-
mines eight other dimensions of the artwork
and is itself influenced by eight of those others
also suggests that the essay is at least as much
about the masses and their relation to art in
the industrial world as it is about innovations
in technological production. This already
109
deranty & olson
shows that Benjamin’s interest in the political
dimensions of aesthetics is inseparable from
the presentation of the main body of the essay.
The graph in Figure 1 reveals another feature
of the essay that is more substantial and conse-
quential for how we should understand Benja-
min’s theorization of the links between
aesthetics and politics. Only one of the twelve
aesthetic concepts addressed in the essay – the
social function of art – is said to be affected or
determined by other concepts in the constella-
tion without affecting any of the others in
turn. In other words, social function is an
apex concept in Benjamin’s analysis. When we
rearrange the graph to reflect this, a striking
feature of the implicit structure of the aesthetic
theory of the essay comes into view (Figure 2).
We see now that Benjamin highlights five
dimensions of aesthetic life in particular as
directly impacting the broad social function of
the work of art. These five dimensions – the
dominant art form, the value form of art, the
audience, the appropriate aesthetic attitude,
and the mode of perception or aisthesis culti-
vated by the work of art – are densely connected
to each other and more loosely linked to the
remaining six dimensions of the analysis. We
can see, in other words, that Benjamin offers
an aesthetic theory of the social function of
art in so far as it is determined by the inter-
relation of five primary, historically variable
aesthetic dimensions, which are themselves
woven into an even wider field of related
concepts.
This interpretation of the Artwork essay
issues in a powerful tool for thinking about his-
torical changes in the political potentials
implicit in art and aesthetic life. As we have
already seen, Benjamin’s sensitivity to the mul-
tidimensional nature of “the aesthetic” is not
unique. What we find particularly useful in his
analytical model, however, is that, after isolating
these twelve aspects of the social context of the
work of art, Benjamin devotes the majority of
the essay to exploring the network of relations
that bind them into a structural theory of the
social function of the artwork. In contrast,
then, to interpretations that emphasize one
aspect of Benjamin’s analysis – the aura, for
 the work of art
Fig. 2. Rearranging the graph from Figure 1 illustrates the structure implicit in the multidimensional aes-
thetic theory of Benjamin’s Artwork essay.
example, or technological advances in the repro-
duction and distribution of art – our interpret-
ation takes the systematic network of relations
between the dimensions of his analysis to be
its most valuable contemporary legacy.21 In
what follows, we will develop this idea by
exploring how Benjamin’s model of the determi-
nation of the social function of the work of art
by five central dimensions of aesthetic experi-
ence sheds light on our own historical moment.
the work of art in the age of its
digital distribution
The main point of the structural reading of Ben-
jamin’s famous text we have just proposed is to
extract a useful analytical framework from it.
This endeavour itself is premised on the convic-
tion that few authors, if any, provide as rich and
coherent a framework as Benjamin does in this
text, provided one goes past its initial impressio-
nistic appearance and focuses instead on the way
in which Benjamin manages to integrate consist-
ently all the relevant dimensions.
The ultimate point of extracting such a fra-
mework is to see how it helps us to think
about our own predicament. What we want to
do then is see how Benjamin’s structural analy-
sis of the aesthetic can be applied to make sense
of what we might call, with Jacques Rancière,
our own “regime of the arts.”22 In order to
proceed to such an application, it is useful to
begin by summing up the results of the previous
analysis in a simplified table, which lists the five
major dimensions of the aesthetic that directly
contribute to the historically specific function
of artworks (Table 1).
Based on the model that is built into this
table, our question is the following: if the func-
tion of the work of art in pre-industrial times
was ritual, and this ritual function was fulfilled
by creating an aura around the work, an aura
that would stem from the uniqueness of the
object and the way in which it was perceived,
namely through contemplation from afar by an
audience of a few, similar to the congregation
of the initiated that have direct access to a god
or a king; and if the function of the work of
art in the industrial era, by contrast, is a
110
 deranty & olson

Table 1. The core aesthetic concepts and their historical variation as described in Benjamin’s
Artwork essay
Art Form Value Audience Attitude Aisthesis Function
Pre-industrial Painting Ritual The few Contemplation Optical Ritual
Industrial Cinema Exhibition The masses Distraction Tactile Political

political function, in the sense that the indefi-
nitely reproducible image has the potential to
put the collective in the position of subject,
because the technological apparatus puts the
object of mimesis under the collective gaze,
and thereby grants the latter a critical function
and gives it a sense of its own agency; then,
what of the work of art today? What is its func-
tion? And how is that function achieved specifi-
cally by the five core aesthetic dimensions listed
in the table, given that a new historical predica-
ment, in other words, a new nexus of technologi-
cal possibilities and economic structures,
provides a new framework in which aisthesis,
value, audience, and the very status of the
work of art are also transformed?
Table 2 summarizes the way we speculate
Benjamin’s analysis could be extended into
our very own “regime of the arts.”
Let us define succinctly each of the key terms
we are introducing to answer the question
above. It is our wager that these terms and the
generality with which we define them have
both intrinsic intuitive appeal and empirical
traction. In each case we substantiate our con-
ceptual decisions with recourse to key refer-
ences in the field of contemporary philosophy
and art theory.
curation
What do we mean by curation, and why do we
claim it has become the paradigmatic art form
of our time? As with every other term in the
table, when we speak of curation, we have in
mind a highly formal notion, so that the usage
of it in the specialist world of elite fine art is
only one segment of the much broader extension
of the notion. This is in line with Benjamin’s
analysis, in which “aesthetic” denotes both
specialized art practices as well as broader
forms of expression and representation. The
methodological focus of Benjamin’s analysis is
how a given historical context – the combination
of technological, economic, and social realities –
creates the conditions for historically specific
aesthetic forms. In this formal sense, we take
curation to mean the assembling of objects
that marks out a space in which a community
might come together.
To understand why we select this concept to
illuminate specific aesthetic potentialities of
our time, it might be useful to contrast it nega-
tively with previous historical paradigms. It
seems justified to say that the act of painting
can no longer be paradigmatic, when technology
makes it possible for anyone to produce any kind
of artwork in any genre for any audience.23 This
was Benjamin’s argument already, and it
becomes even more powerful in an age when
anyone can record images of anything in any
place and at any time with the smallest electronic
device. Film was supposed to take over from tra-
ditional art forms as a result of this universaliza-
tion of reproducibility, but it too is now
demoted. This time the problem is that when

Table 2. The historical manifestations of Benjamin’s core aesthetic concepts extended to our
current moment
Art Form Value Audience Attitude Aisthesis Function
Pre-industrial Painting Ritual The few Contemplation Optical Ritual
Industrial Cinema Exhibition The masses Distraction Tactile Political
Post-Fordist Curation Investment Multitudes Attention Libidinal Social

111
 the work of art
the production of commodities, material
(durable objects) and symbolic (images,
sounds, stories, brands, signs of all kinds), is
saturated, the question of reproducibility
becomes utterly irrelevant. In the age of radically
planned obsolescence, of nearly instantaneous
overtaking of the latest trend, exhibition value
is replaced by new forms of aesthetic value.
What kind of creative, expressive gesture is
made possible by such a time as ours, character-
ized by universal democratization of recording
and expressive tools and exponential increase
in commodity production? In such a context,
it seems that the exemplary creative act is no
longer to emulate a genius whose divine inspi-
ration allows him to depict the transcendent
power of gods and kings (Michelangelo as para-
digmatic artist), or to make oneself the medium
through which the masses can represent them-
selves to themselves (Dziga Vertov or D.W.
Griffith, in very different guises). The paradig-
matic form of creative production today con-
sists, in our view, in bringing together objects
(material or symbolic) – some of which might
have been produced by the creator herself and
others of which might have already existed –
in such a way that a new, temporary socius coa-
lesces around the collected objects, through the
sharing of a joint interest. This is what we mean
by “curation.”24
The claim that curation has become the kind
of creative gesture that best corresponds to our
time will be justified in (hopefully virtuous) cir-
cular fashion by the analysis of the other core
dimensions. But it can also find confirmation
in the writings of a major theorist of contempor-
ary art, Nicolas Bourriaud.
In Relational Aesthetics (1998), Bourriaud
emphasizes the fact that art has always been
“relational” to the extent that it is defined by
the specific ontology underpinning the struc-
tural relations that Benjamin identified. What
is specific about the contemporary moment,
Bourriaud argues, is that this relationality,
which is a given feature of all art, becomes an
object for artists explicitly to explore, treasure,
and create in new modalities. This task takes on
a new urgency given the fate of human sociality
in the reified, hyper-commodified “society of
the spectacle” and the crowded, policed mega-
cities of our modernity. The curating act, on
this view, can establish new, fleeting commu-
nities around relations which did not exist
prior to the creative intervention. The commu-
nities assembled in this way can be reflective or
critical of existing bonds, thus suggesting and
in fact establishing new, utopian or alternative
bonds.25
In Postproduction (2002) and The Radicant
(2009), Bourriaud pursues his analysis of the
present by addressing the aesthetic implications
of contemporary modes of production. “Post-
production” designates our economic structure,
resulting from the shift in advanced sectors of
contemporary capitalism from production of
industrial goods to the creation and exchange
of information. In turn this corresponds to
vast shifts in individuals’ aisthetic abilities, in
modes of perception and ways of being in the
world, through the exposure of individuals to
communication technologies. This socio-econ-
omic context is also characterized by the
opening of traditions, both across the globe
and across time, because of the flattening of
status hierarchies. Duchamp’s motto “art is a
game between all people of all periods” encapsu-
lates what Bourriaud is driving at.26 Globaliza-
tion has brought about hyper-exploitation of
the natural world and trans-border domination
of labour by capital, but it also marks a time
when this game between all peoples becomes
possible as never before. In the present
moment, it is art, for Bourriaud, that is the pri-
vileged agent realizing this possibility.
What these features of our present make
possible are new sharings of resources (sym-
bolic, but also, in many contemporary perform-
ances, material) and indeed new ways of being
that performatively demonstrate new modalities
of living, both in a collective and an individual
sense. Polemicizing against the post-modern
temptation to define artistic action in a reified
way as expression of essentialized identities,
Bourriaud advocates “translation,” taken both
in the discursive sense and in the physical
sense of creative displacement.27 The artist’s
responsibility and opportunity are precisely to
facilitate such innovative “translations.”
112

This is where Bourriaud’s positive descrip-
tions of contemporary art projects chime in par-
ticularly well with our emphasis on curation. In
every example he discusses it is a matter of
setting up temporary space-time concretions in
which new modes of sociability, praxis, and
being can emerge. These rely no longer on
demiurgic, expressive, or representative acts
but emerge rather out of the elaboration of orig-
inal scripts, scenarios, hypertexts, formulas,
softwares, processes, etc. that provide the
frames and the opportunities for new configur-
ations of meaning and practice to be observed,
manipulated, and enacted by spectators who
usually become participants, or indeed co-crea-
tors.28 As a result, the
work of contemporary art is no longer
defined as the endpoint of the creative
process but rather as an interface, a generator
of activities. The artist tinkers and impro-
vises on the basis of general production and
moves around the network of signs, inserting
his or her own forms into existing channels.29
For Bourriaud, contemporary artists are thus
“semionauts,” travellers in signs, who take
their audiences along with them, in a paradigm
of “formal communism.” The generic formula
summarizing what Bourriaud has in view with
his idea fits with our own generic definition of
curation: the “production of forms through
the collection of information.”30
Bourriaud’s conception of relational aes-
thetics captures the way our understanding of
curation as an aesthetic form has manifested
itself in the art world at the turn of the millen-
nium. As we will show in greater depth below,
curation is not a form of art limited to the rare-
fied climes of the Palais de Tokyo. Much in our
aesthetic lives has come to be mediated by forms
of curation, especially by its online and digital
forms, and this development has important con-
sequences for the character of the audience gath-
ered around and addressed by aesthetic works.
multitudes
What kind of socius is fostered by such curating
gestures? The ontology of that socius is
113
deranty & olson
strikingly different from the massive molarity
of Fordist industrialism described by Benjamin.
This is due in no small part to the fact that the
infinite accumulation of commodities in late
capitalist society makes it possible almost to
individualize forms of consumption, or at the
very least to break down the collective into an
indefinite number of niches and specialized
groups of interest. The term that best captures
the new modality of the collective, we think, is
the notion of multitudes (the plural matters).
The term denotes a collective that is made up
of smaller collectives relatively differentiated
from each other, and themselves made of up
non-homogenized individualities. Since the mul-
titude crystallizes around the “artwork” via the
medium of curation and around a specific inter-
est, we might define multitudes simply as com-
munities of interests, in the most formal sense
of those terms.
Antonio Negri’s definition of multitudes,
even though it pursues different theoretical
aims from ours and uses the Marxist reference
in a more intense and rigorous sense than we
do, fits well with our approach and lends it con-
ceptual density. In his 2004 book with Michael
Hardt, Negri defines the eponymous concept
as follows: “The multitude designates an active
social subject, which acts on the basis of what
the singularities [that compose it] share in
common.”31 Apart from the specific ontology
denoted by the term, which is captured well in
Negri’s analyses, other features of his concept
also coincide with what we try to capture with
it. For Negri, multitude is the new class
concept that is required in the post-Fordist
mode of production, notably because this
mode of production is the one that sees the
realization of the “general intellect” predicted
by Marx in the Grundrisse as a result of scienti-
fic and technological – in particular machine –
development.32 This overlaps with the “intelli-
gible” that Bourriaud mentions, namely the
immense wealth of symbolic production in our
regime, and the fact that the internet and new
communication technologies make this wealth
available to almost everyone. It is on the basis
of this that an infinite number of loosely differ-
entiated networks arise (groups defined by
 the work of art
shared interests), and new forms of communi-
cation, co-operation and cohabitation become
possible. In direct reference to the text that is
our own core reference, Negri makes the point
explicitly that his concept of multitude replaces
that of the masses.33
It should be clear once again that our defi-
nition of multitudes is supposed to apply
equally well to cases of specialist “high art” and
to consumer entertainment products or users of
social media. Thus, a Rirkrit Tiravanija exhibi-
tion draws around itself a local, temporary mul-
titude, but so does the posting of photos of a
family birthday party on one’s Facebook page.
What matters here is to see how historical vari-
ation in technological context and its economic
frame determine specific ontologies of audiences.
attention and libidinality
The spectator in front of the painting or the
sculpture adopts a contemplative intentional
stance. The paradigmatic attitudinal relation to
the artwork here is optical. In the cinema, the
moving image and the building in which it is
projected, the collective audience is in a state
of distraction. Haptic tactility is the prime
intentional attitude here. For Benjamin, this is
the assurance of film’s revolutionary power,
since it habituates the masses to developing a
direct, physical hold of the situation in the
form of habit, a condition for an effectual over-
throw of the political structure.
What is the intentional mode of participation
of a multitude with an object of interest? We can
take our bearings from Benjamin’s text to
answer that question. He writes of film: “the
film makes the cult value recede into the back-
ground not only by putting the public in the
position of the critic, but also by the fact that
at the movies this position requires no atten-
tion” (241). We want to argue that the new con-
stellation requires a shift in the audience’s (the
multitudes’) aesthetic attitude toward the work
of art, from “non-attention” precisely to “atten-
tion,” which is different from pre-industrial
contemplation.
Contemplation is attention commanded by an
aura, something that is present yet will always
remain distant, as a token of noumenality. Dis-
traction is participation that is non-attentive,
akin to habitual, haptic inhabiting of the place
or the event. By contrast, attention is inten-
tional participation that is commanded by an
interest, driven by the hope of the realization
of a desire. In a very formal sense, we thus
define “attention” as the attitude of an audi-
ence whose interest has been aroused by, and
settled for a time on, an object.
The desiring and conative features of this new
type of intentionality explain why we associate
this mode of intentional participation with libi-
dinality as the characteristic aisthesis of the
time. By that we mean simply an affective,
embodied orientation toward an object that
expresses itself in an enactive engagement
with the object. The proper way of relating to
an authentic painting is by distant, optical defer-
ence; a film, through haptic (yet critical) absorp-
tion. In the age of curated spaces, an audience’s
attitude is interest driven, libidinal in a broad
sense, engaging a desire of the person that
forces her to turn her attention to the object.
Pornography is not by chance a paradigmatic
industry of our age, one that has played a
major part in driving technological innovation
on the internet that all other industries have
then appropriated.34
These two key terms of attention and libidin-
ality refer to each other in circular fashion for a
good reason. They aim to characterize a crucial
feature of the new mode of production. The
latter seeks to capture attention, by arousing
the interest of audiences, indeed by trying to
manufacture new interests and thus induce new
“interest groups.” In the “post-productive” para-
digm, it is attention and no longer consumption
of use-values that is the key to economic success.
The emphasis on attention and libidinality
can justify itself once again by recourse to an
external reference, this time the immense litera-
ture dedicated to the new “economy of atten-
tion.” Particularly useful for our purposes in
this respect is Yves Citton’s excellent study of
this phenomenon in his Ecology of Attention
(2014). Citton offers a brilliant synthesis of all
the dimensions of attention that make the
concept one of the crucial characteristics of
114

our time. At the functional level, and in the
wake of Gabriel Tarde’s writings, Citton’s
book demonstrates that attention is a key build-
ing block of social ontology, which mediates
between the macro-, meso- and micro-levels of
large collective phenomena (culture and
language), intersubjectivity, and individual for-
mation. It is by focusing on structures and
mediations of attention that one can describe
the specific features of the present, as a world
where collective and individual phenomena are
framed and determined by the new media and
information technologies. Furthermore, pre-
cisely because of its central “social-ontological”
importance, attention has been captured by
capitalistic valuation processes, and, as a large
literature argues, and as we try to exemplify in
the conclusion, has become the determining
factor in the most advanced forms of post-
Fordist capitalism. And finally, at the critical
and political levels, Citton seeks to show that
the notion of attention is a major stake in con-
temporary ethical and political practices
aiming for individual and collective emancipa-
tion. Amongst other things, Ecology of Atten-
tion is a manifesto making the case that a true
ecological political programme must be framed
in terms of how we regulate and recalibrate
the media that capture our attention.35
Apart from the wealth of information and
analyses documenting the functional centrality
of phenomena of attention today, Citton’s
study is particularly useful for our purposes
because it underlines the ambivalence of atten-
tion. This echoes our interest in building upon
Benjamin’s analysis, which famously high-
lighted the ambivalent power of the loss of the
aura, with the uncertain balance between regres-
sive aestheticized politics and progressive politi-
cized aesthetics. Similarly, attention is both the
affective entry point of highly invasive exploita-
tive and reifying capitalistic logics of value
extraction and indeed of social-political
control; and at the same time that which a crea-
tive project (political or aesthetic) can lean on
and leverage in order to propose and indeed per-
formatively build alternative, less destructive
modes of being in common and being in the
world, through joint forms of “caring attention”
115
deranty & olson
dedicated to natural and human resources.36
Indeed, when he analyses the role of attention
in aesthetic experience, Citton describes in par-
ticularly convincing terms exactly the status of
the work of art in late capitalism, as we
propose to describe it. He writes:
Our aesthetic experiences relate to an atti-
tude of (collective) experimentation which
corresponds closely with how we imagine
the laboratory: a space that is temporarily iso-
lated from the daily world becomes a place of
investigation, where we test certain limits of
what can be done, perceived, felt, discovered,
thought, or justified. To be more precise,
artistic modernity has taught us to make
our encounter with the work the occasion
for an “experience” (of cognitive dissonance):
even if here is no attempt to quantitatively
measure its effects, this encounter has the
value of a “test” through which we may
appreciate what an artist can do and a specta-
tor experience.
Our aesthetic experiences also relate to
the laboratory in the etymological sense of
the term, in that they are the place of a
labour. On the side of the “creator” –
which, along with É tienne Souriau, we
would do well to think of as an “investigator”
– even the art of improvisation or the found
object, which establishes an important role
for serendipity, is largely based on a sedimen-
tation of the efforts necessary to bring about
interesting encounters or discoveries. The
participation of the reader, the listener or
the spectator is also a kind of “labour” in
that all our aesthetic experiences constitute,
each in their own way, a certain challenge
brought to our attention capabilities (a chal-
lenge to our tolerance for classification
delay): we are invited to labour on ourselves
to raise our sensitivity, our sentiments, and
our understanding to the level of the pro-
gramme that the work offers us.37
By substituting “investigator” or “instigator”
(instaurateur) for “creator” (créateur) and by
foregrounding the “sedimentation of the efforts
that are necessary to allow for new encounters
and interesting discoveries to occur,” Citton cap-
tures the dynamic generation of communities
through the attraction of attention we defined
 the work of art
above as “curation.” Communities of interest
require more than just attention, however, if
they are to enjoy anything other than fleeting
existence.38
investment value
The traditional work of art aimed to create what
Benjamin called “cult value,” that is, the kind of
noumenal significance attached to transcendent
objects by earthly beings. The work of art in
industrial capitalism, he claimed, aimed to
produce “exhibition value,” that is, the signifi-
cance attached to items allowing the collective
to reflect upon its own powers of creation. If
we accept that we have moved to a new regime
of the arts, as a result of the shifts in the
mode of production, what value does the con-
temporary work of art (and with it, of course,
all other forms of expression and represen-
tation) aim to produce?
In line with everything we have suggested
above, we want to say that the value of the con-
temporary artwork is investment value, which
we define formally as the property of an object
to arouse an interest in the audience and to
induce that audience to engage with the
object. Once again, the term should be under-
stood formally, in order to keep open the possi-
bility for the phenomenon to go in opposite
directions.
On one side of the spectrum we have “curat-
ing” acts that aim to capture an audience’s atten-
tion by establishing libidinal triggers toward the
object, so that the audience “invests” in the
object in a manner that can be valorized in a
capitalistic sense: to increase market share,
brand recognition, or indeed for direct financial
profit, notably through advertising moneys. As
Citton shows brilliantly in Ecology of Atten-
tion, the new capitalism is a capitalism of atten-
tion, premised upon the investment made by
audiences into the objects proposed to them
by the information and entertainment indus-
tries. Citing a leading theorist of the new
media, he can show that “attention is becoming
the hegemonic form of capital.”39
But taken in a formal sense, “investment”
does not necessarily imply a logic of financial
expenditure and profit. The term can have an
existential meaning. In French s’investir in a
cause means to commit oneself to it. At the
other end of the spectrum, therefore, curating
acts can catalyse forms of personal and collec-
tive “investment” that will translate into indi-
vidual and collective mobilization, innovation,
and creation. The “value” of the work of art,
in this regard, is no longer whether one can
find in it the secularized equivalent of transcen-
dent noumenality, but rather its pragmatic
capacity to engage the audience in the latter’s
own “labour” (to invoke Citton) of self-trans-
formation in the affective, intellectual, and
social dimensions of their existence.
The investment value of artworks we take to
characterize the social place of art in contempor-
ary life is distinct from the pre-industrial ritual
value and the Fordist exhibition value that Ben-
jamin diagnosed. The former placed audiences
in a markedly passive position relative to the
powers of the artwork and the artist; the latter
awakened a sense of the agency of the masses,
which effected the audience’s active posture.
The investment value characteristic of contem-
porary aesthetic experience cultivates a respon-
sive activity that is neither wholly active nor
wholly passive. Investment, whether financial
investment or libidinal investment, requires an
external trigger: nascent trends in the market,
an object of desire, or a collection of objects
that attract one’s attention. Any investment on
the part of the audience responds to this initial
trigger such that the relation of a community
of interest to the objects in which it invests is
structured by a dialectic of passivity and
activity.
social function
The systematic model of “the aesthetic” we
extracted from Benjamin’s Artwork essay
holds the social function of the work of art to
be a function of the joint influence of five key
dimensions of aesthetic life: art form or
medium, value, audience, attitude, and ais-
thesis. When Benjamin defined the main func-
tion of the artwork in the age of its mechanical
reproducibility as a political one, what he had
116

in view was the fact that the defining features of
the industrial age produced an original relation-
ship between representation and audience, one
in which representations would impact on the
collective as a whole: in a regressive, populist
manner when they were used to channel the
fears and desires of the masses; in a progressive
manner if they were to show the masses how
they could take hold of their own organization.
The homogeneous masses of the Fordist age
have given way to splintered multitudes. Tech-
nology enables modes of expression, distri-
bution, and consumption that are almost
individualized, that at the very least target
mini-masses made up of “singularities,” to
speak like Negri. In such a context, the relation-
ship between representations and audiences
changes once again. It can no longer be held to
the “political” function in the mass-rising and
mass-exploitation sense Benjamin had in view.
We want to suggest, following Bourriaud on
the positive side of things, but also having in
mind the exploitative possibilities of the new
regime of representation, that the new function
of the “work of art” is no longer political, at
least not in Benjamin’s sense, but rather
“social.” That is, “works of art” today are invi-
tations to create social bonds, to aggregate par-
ticular socii: for exploitative reasons in the
case of capitalistic media ventures, such as tra-
ditional TV channels, or Silicon Valley social
media, as in the example we dwell on in the
next section; or to create collaborative networks
of solidarity, in the case of open-source and
sharing collectives; and for a new politics of
the common in the case of many projects in con-
temporary high art.40
Bourriaud’s appeal to a “formal commun-
ism,” that is, the “curation” of publicly avail-
able spaces, objects, and signs for the purpose
of creating new social bonds, shows that the
emphasis on the “social function” of art does
not necessarily lead to a pitting of a socialist
project against a communist one. Rather, an
old, Fordist sense of the collective owning the
commons is replaced by a more heterogeneous
one, without this replacement necessarily chal-
lenging the imperative for a collective reappro-
priation of common resources.
117
deranty & olson
facebook and the curation of
personal and financial investment
In recent years art critics have argued insight-
fully in favour of the artistic merits of curatorial
work.41 If curation has now become recognized
as an art form in its own right by those con-
cerned primarily with the fine arts, the case
that curation is at the heart of more quotidian
aesthetic experience is even stronger. Social
media have harnessed the nearly limitless
digital reproducibility of images and sounds,
with the result that a growing array of online
platforms function as a particularly effective
gavage funnelling a substantial diet of transitory
signs into the bellies of billions of global consu-
mers. Facebook, which surpassed two billion
active monthly users in the third quarter of
2017, demands special attention in any effort
to come to grips with the social function of art
in the first part of the third millennium.
Indeed, Facebook is an excellent illustration of
the model of the contemporary aesthetic situ-
ation sketched in the previous section.
Facebook is an exemplary curatorial space.
Users collect and exhibit content – images,
videos, music, film clips, texts – on more than
sixty-five million individual and group pages.
Every day, millions of objects are posted by
individuals operating around the world using
the architecture provided by Facebook to
create a multitude of small audiences gathering
around specific interests. Communities of inter-
est coalesce around the objects collected and
presented on individual and group pages. The
scale of these communities varies widely, from
family members sharing photographs with a
focused group of intimates to nearly 1,000
members gathered around the Arnold Schoen-
berg group page to the 400,000-strong Justin
Bieber Fan Club page. What is especially inter-
esting about this process is that members of
these communities of interest participate by
curating content in a way that responds to,
expands, and deepens the curatorial efforts of
other members of the community.
By presenting pieces of content on Facebook,
users aim to court the attention of overlapping
communities that persist only as long as user
 the work of art
attention can be converted into some form of
community investment, which entails that
users at first attracted by existing content
come to contribute additional content in order
to perpetuate the community and garner
additional attention. A flourishing community
of interest will see users return regularly to
interact with and expand the curatorial basis
of their shared objects of interest. In this case,
the active engagement of users with the commu-
nity leads individuals to see their own online
identities reflect their personal investments in
the communities in which they participate, in
the form of comments, “likes,” “tagging,”
“friending” and “unfriending,” etc.42 In turn,
we can assume that the “value addition” to the
online identity feeds directly into the identity
of a real individual. Whatever the other forms
of “libidinality” attached to specific objects of
interest, at the very least personal online invest-
ment promises value addition to that most fun-
damental of drives, primary narcissism.
In short, Facebook offers a curatorial
medium in which interest-based communities
collect and distribute images, texts, videos,
and sounds as ways of attracting the attention
of others, whose subsequent investment alters
and redefines the communities of which they
have now become active members. For all the
participants involved, the subjective investment
involved in participating in communities of
interest promises different kinds of libidinal
rewards.
From the point of view of users, Facebook
appears to provide only a blank platform on
which its users perform the actual curating of
content with an eye to building communities.
In fact Facebook engages in its own, active
form of curation. At one level, Facebook is all
about user-generated content, but as we all
know, at another level, the users are the
content. Indeed, the point of providing the plat-
form was to make that “meta-”curation poss-
ible. For the point of Facebook is to curate
target audiences for advertisers seeking to
reach very specific demographics. By making
note of the personal content posted by users,
Facebook is able to offer advertisers access
to shockingly narrowly defined audiences.
To summarize an example recently highlighted
on Facebook’s own website about its advertising
system, a shoe store opening a new location
might purchase advertisements that will only
be shown to Facebook users who live within
five miles of the store, have recently started a
new job, have recently visited a handful of web-
sites selling shoes, and whose household income
is greater than $75,000. Or the developer of a
new telecommunications app might target
expatriate users who have an iPhone, are in a
long-distance relationship, and have recently
purchased technology. In these cases, the rel-
evant community of interest is not Facebook
users but advertisers. Facebook attracts their
attention by virtue of its ability to curate collec-
tions of users whom the advertisers hope to
influence. Facebook thus induces the commu-
nity of advertisers to invest and become them-
selves actively engaged in the platform, only
this time on the condition that the curated
content on offer warrants financial investment
in the eyes of the community of interest. The
short lifespan of effective online marketing
and Facebook’s system for bidding on advertis-
ing costs mean that advertisers regularly rework
their ads, revisit their target demographics, and
submit revised bids to purchase fine-tuned
advertisements. Much as Facebook encourages
a libidinal engagement with the platform on
the part of its non-commercial users, it has
developed a system for selling advertisement
that rewards sustained attention and repeated
financial investment on the part of its commer-
cial users.
At the same time that advertisers form a com-
munity of interest for Facebook’s advertising
division, they typically also appear on the
other side of the platform, when they seek to
generate communities of consumers for their
own products. The goal here, too, is to spur a
form of investment – this time in the form of
a purchase – from the communities whose atten-
tion the advertiser temporarily attracts. The
different layers of curation and community cre-
ation, which are built on the most basic level out
of collections of publicly shared images and
text, thus bleed into each other. The curator is
also curated content, sometimes acting as
118

active participant in the construction of a com-
munity of mutual recognition structured by a
shared interest, sometimes figured as a rela-
tively passive audience which others vie to
induce into one purchase or another. In every
case, however, the circulation of images takes
on a social function, which assembles differen-
tiated communities whose shape is built out of
and transformed by the libidinal investment of
its members. The diabolical efficiency – econ-
omic and communicative – of Facebook comes
from the fact that all the different forms of
investment feed off each other. This demon-
strates the most acute understanding of the
new value that contemporary “works of art”
can produce.
conclusion: social media and politics
We saw above that Benjamin is keenly aware of
the ambivalence of the political potential of art
and aesthetics. Just as much as conservative
forces had successfully yoked the new socio-
economic reality to older ideas of creativity,
genius, and transcendent power, he argued
that opposing forces might yet leverage
cinema’s ability to mobilize the masses for the
purposes of progressive political awakening.
That same ambivalence continues to character-
ize our present situation. One might well take
a cynical view of the contemporary nexus out-
lined above and its exemplification in the reifica-
tion and exploitation of personal identity and
social life in Facebook’s advertising model.
Such a view would, however, be a mistake. In
order to contest this brand of pessimism, and
to underline the diversity of potentials in our
Benjaminian understanding of the contempor-
ary relations between aesthetics and politics,
we will conclude with what one might reason-
ably take as a more positive example of the pol-
itical application of the modern social function
of aesthetic life.
In June 2010, Khaled Said was dragged from
an internet café in Alexandria, Egypt and beaten
to death by two police officers. It appears that
Said was targeted by police after he recorded a
video depicting local police corruption, which
was later uploaded to YouTube. Within days
119
deranty & olson
of his death, a graphic photo of Said’s battered
corpse was released by his family and circulated
widely on Egyptian internet sites. A Google
employee and political activist living in Dubai
quickly created a Facebook page intended to gal-
vanize support for political change in Egypt
called “We Are All Khaled Said,” which
attracted more than 100,000 active users
within a couple of weeks. Flocking to the
page, users collected images and reports of
police brutality, shared messages of sympathy
and support, and co-ordinated protests.43 The
attention attracted by the confronting photo-
graphs of Said hardened for a time into a self-
organizing community of political actors
invested in pursuing political interests arising
within the community itself. The role played
by the digital curation of affectively powerful
images and texts in the creation of a community
of interest actively invested in challenging a pol-
itical power illustrates the positive potential of
the contemporary aesthetic arrangement.
It is not obvious, of course, that we ought to
think about the role of Facebook in the Arab
Spring through an aesthetic lens. The analytical
framework we have attempted to develop out of
Benjamin’s Artwork essay helps us to appreciate
the far-reaching consequences of the imbrication
of aesthetic and social life. Just as the Benja-
minian framework we have developed here
reflects developments in galleries and museums,
it also captures the aesthetic dimensions of the
curation of aesthetic objects – photographs, car-
toons, video clips, texts – in communities
outside the art world. Seen from this vantage
point, the emergence of communities of interest,
whether gathered around the curation of politi-
cally charged images of suffering, mobilized by
a hashtag and custom emoji, or transfixed by
the bewildering obscurity of a perfume commer-
cial shared online, is a modern manifestation of
the diverse fabric of “the aesthetic” whose rich
social and political entanglements are sugges-
tively schematized by the analytical framework
implicit in Benjamin’s Artwork essay.
We have illustrated the ways in which we
take an updated version of Benjamin’s funda-
mental analytical framework to apply to the
contemporary moment by the way that aesthetic
 the work of art
curation functions in the accretion of specifi-
cally commercial and social situations. These
examples reflect the broad scope to which the
model might be applied. Though we have left
it to the side here, we hope the analytical
power of the model in relation to more directly
political communities is nonetheless clear.
Recent populist efforts to leverage the curator-
ial powers of social media in order to trigger
the economic, legislative, and electoral invest-
ment of individuals in an exclusionary defi-
nition of the socius along ethno-nationalist
lines underscore the political stakes of our
analysis of the social function of the work of
art today. Benjamin might be disappointed
but he would certainly not be surprised that
reactionary political forces
remain at the vanguard of the
effective political mobilization
of the network of historically
variable elements that compose
“the aesthetic.”
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the authors.
notes
1 In what follows, references to the essay are
drawn from Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This is a trans-
lation of the second version of the text – the
most complete one. More recent translations of
the essay adhere more closely to the German
title, which is rendered “The Work of Art in
the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”
When citing the title of the essay, we prefer
the latter translation. When discussing the con-
tents of the essay, however, we will adopt the
language of “mechanical” rather than “technical”
reproduction. This emphasizes the important
differences between the primarily mechanical
processes that attract Benjamin’s attention and
the largely digital nature of the reproduction
and distribution of texts and images that we
address below.
2 We are not alone, of course, in emphasizing the
systematic elements of Benjamin’s analyses, which
are brought out elegantly in González and Sarlo;
Ross.
3 For a thorough analysis of the diverse meanings
of “aesthetics,” see Welsch. On the many meanings
of “politics,” see, for example, Deranty, “En quels
sens le travail vivant est-il une catégorie politique?”
On the various meanings of “aestheticized poli-
tics,” see, for example, Jay; Simons; Rockhill.
4 The heart of Benjamin’s analysis of the pro-
duction or creation of works of art is found in
“Work of Art” 218–20, 228–30.
5 Ibid. 219–20.
6 See especially ibid. 218–19, 225–27.
7 Ibid. 221.
8 See, in particular, ibid. 220–21.
9 Ibid. 234.
10 Benjamin’s most sustained comments on the
masses come at ibid. 251 n. 21.
11 Ibid. 222.
12 See, in particular, ibid. 322–23.
13 See especially ibid. 239.
14 Ibid. 240.
15 He remarks on both the “secular cult of
beauty” (ibid. 224) and on the masses’ more pro-
gressive judgments of cinema than painting (ibid.
231).
16 On mimesis in art, see especially ibid. 223, 235–
36.
17 Ibid. 237, 249–50 n. 17.
18 See Ross.
19 Since our interest lies in extracting a heuristic
tool from Benjamin’s analysis, we forgo here a
detailed exposition of each of the relations
marked out in the Artwork essay. For readers
who might be interested in charting those func-
tional relations throughout the text, we will
simply list them here. Benjamin describes the
determinative role played by the process of pro-
duction: on ontology at 220–21 and 224; on value
at 225 and 241; on need at 237; on aisthesis at
235–36; on mimesis at 230; on judgment at 232–
34; on audience at 228–29, 231, and 234; and on
the art form at 218–21 and 244 n. 7. The influence
of the art form: on function at 225; on value at 225–
120

26, 240, and 251 n. 21; on mimesis at 233, 235–36,
and 249 n. 16; on judgment at 231 and 234; on audi-
ence at 234 and 250 n. 17; on aisthesis at 235–36;
on attitude at 239 and 240; on ontology at 223;
on participation at 240; and on production at 244
n. 7. The determinative role of ontology: on audi-
ence at 220–21, 223, and 225; on function at 221
and 224; on value at 225 and 244 n. 6; on judgment
at 244 n. 6; and on mimesis at 223. The influence of
audience: on aisthesis at 223; on ontology at 223; on
value at 225; on production at 228–29, 231, and
251 n. 21; on function at 239–41; on art form at
234–35 and 250 n. 17; and on attitude at 239.
The influence of value: on function at 223, 224,
226–27, and 243 n. 5; on art form at 225–26 and
233; on audience at 225; and on ontology at 226.
The influence of aisthesis: on art form at 222; on
audience at 223; on function at 222; and on
mimesis at 223. The influence of aesthetic attitude:
on art form at 237, 239, and 240; on audience at
239; on function at 223–24 and 239–40; on partici-
pation at 239–40; and on aisthesis at 240. The influ-
ence of the mode of participation: on attitude at 240;
on audience at 239–40; and on aisthesis at 240. The
influence of judgment: on audience at 231 and on
art form at 231 and 234. The influence of the art
form on ontology at 223 and participation at 240,
and the influence of need on aesthetic attitude, pro-
duction, and art form at 237. Finally, he addresses
the influence of mimesis on ontology and aisthesis
at 223.
20 Ferris.
21 Interpretations that foreground aura and ontol-
ogy include, for example, Crimp; Ziarek; Jaeger.
Hansen argues that Benjamin’s understanding of
aura cannot be restricted to a narrow conception
of aesthetics; our understanding of the conceptual
constellation that makes up Benjamin’s aesthetic
theory accords with the thrust of her analysis.
For interpretations that emphasize the technology
of production, see Caygill 79–116; Ferris 104–10.
22 See, for instance, Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics.
It is possible to extract a comparable analytical fra-
mework, itself articulated around core, historically
dependent distinctions, from the aesthetic writings
of Rancière. See Deranty, “Regimes of the Arts.”
23 That does not mean, of course, that painting no
longer makes any sense, that artists who paint have
become utterly uninteresting, and so forth. As in
Benjamin’s analysis, to speak of “paradigmatic” art
forms is to focus on the specific art form that at
121
deranty & olson
a given time best potentializes the possibilities of
a historical moment.
24 If we pursue Benjamin’s historical analysis in
relation to the craft analogy he uses to explain
the difference between pre-industrial and industrial
regimes, we might say that just as the magician sym-
bolized the first, and the surgeon the second, the
hawker is a good emblem of our time (see Benja-
min, “Work of Art” 233): she creates a space in
which customers are attracted to come through
the very assemblage of commodities there, some
of which she might have made, others she might
have acquired elsewhere.
25 Bourriaud writes:
The form of an artwork issues from a nego-
tiation with the intelligible, which is
bequeathed to us. Through it, the artist
embarks upon a dialogue. The artistic prac-
tice thus resides in the invention of relations
between consciousness [sic]. Each particular
artwork is a proposal to live in a shared
world, and the work of every artist is a
bundle of relations with the world, giving
rise to other relations, and so on and so
forth, ad infinitum. (Relational Aesthetics 22)
The creation of such “bundles of relations” is
exactly what we mean by “curation” as an aesthetic
practice or form of art.
26 Quoted in ibid. 19. See also idem, Postproduc-
tion 18.
27 Idem, The Radicant 22.
28 Thus realizing the Duchampian motto of the
spectator (regardeur) as co-creator of the
artwork. See also Rancière, Emancipated Spectator.
29 Bourriaud, Postproduction 23; translation
modified.
30 Idem, The Radicant 160. In this regard, our
understanding of curation echoes Nick Srnicek’s
analysis of “platforms.” See Srnicek.
31 Hardt and Negri 100.
32 Marx 699–712.
33 See a neat summary in Negri.
34 See Barss Part 3.
35 Citton 165–87.
36 Ibid. 108–12. See also Zuboff.
 the work of art
37 Citton 145; emphasis in original, translation
modified.
38 That Twitter boasts 320 million active monthly
users but also has approximately 300 million users
without a single follower succinctly illustrates the
idea that staging a curatorial space does not itself
generate a corresponding community of interest.
See Muruganandam.
39 Citton 74.
40 It is this sense that we should interpret Bour-
riaud’s claim that “It is the socius, i.e., all the chan-
nels that distribute information and products, that
is the true exhibition site for artists of the current
generation” (Postproduction 71).
41 See, for example, Groys; Ventzislavov; Filipovic.
42 See Hogan; Zhao et al.
43 For a detailed analysis of how the content of
the “We Are All Khaled Said” page played a deci-
sive role in forming the community of dissent at
the heart of the Egyptian Revolution, see Alaimo.
bibliography
Alaimo, Kara. “How the Facebook Arabic Page
‘We Are All Khaled Said’ Helped Promote the
Egyptian Revolution.” Social Media and Society 1.2
(1995): 1–10. Print.
Barss, Patchen. The Erotic Engine: How Pornography
has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg
to Google. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2010.
Print.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction.” Trans. Harry Zohn.
Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York:
Schocken, 2007. 217–51. Print.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. Culture as
Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Trans.
Jeanine Herman. New York: Lukas, 2005. Print.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant. Trans. James
Gussen and Lili Porten. New York: Lukas, 2009.
Print.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans.
Simon Pleasance and Fronza Wood. Paris: Réel,
2002. Print.
Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of
Experience. New York and London: Routledge,
1998. Print.
Citton, Yves. The Ecology of Attention. Trans.
Barnaby Norman. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. Print.
Crimp, Douglas. “The Photographic Activity of
Modernism.” October 15 (1980): 91–101. Print.
Deranty, Jean-Philippe. “En quels sens le travail
vivant est-il une catégorie politique?” Travailler 36
(2016): 59–74. Print.
Deranty, Jean-Philippe. “Regimes of the Arts.”
Rancière: Key Concepts. Ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty.
Durham: Acumen, 2010. 116–31. Print.
Ferris, David S. The Cambridge Introduction to
Benjamin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.
Filipovic, Elena, ed. The Artist as Curator: An
Anthology. London: Mousse, 2017. Print.
González, Francisco, and Beatriz Sarlo. “Forgetting
Benjamin.” Cultural Critique 49 (2001): 84–92. Print.
Groys, Boris. “On the Curatorship.” Art Power.
Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2008. 43–52. Print.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Benjamin’s Aura.” Critical
Inquiry 34.2 (2008): 336–75. Print.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War
and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York:
Penguin, 2004. Print.
Hogan, Bernie. “The Presentation of Self in the Age
of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and
Exhibitions Online.” Bulletin of Science, Technology
and Society 30.6 (2010): 377–86. Print.
Jaeger, Stephen C. “Aura and Charisma: Two
Useful Concepts in Critical Theory.” New German
Review 39.1 (2011): 3–26. Print.
Jay, Martin. “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology:
Or, What Does it Mean to Aestheticize Politics?”
Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 41–61. Print.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus.
New York: Penguin, 1973. Print.
Muruganandam, Cent. “Average Number of Twitter
Followers is 208: Twitter Stats.” Web. 20 Mar.
2018. <https://yourescapefrom9to5.com/average-
number-of-twitter-followers-is-208-infographic>.
Negri, Antonio. “Approximations: Towards an
Ontological Definition of the Multitude.”
Multitudes 9 (2002): 36–48. Print.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator.
Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2011.
Print.
122
 deranty & olson

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans.

Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2006. Print.
Rockhill, Gabriel. Radical History and the Politics of
Art. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Print.
Ross, Alison. Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the
Image. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print.
Simons, Jon. “Aestheticization of Politics: From
Fascism to Radical Democracy.” Journal for
Cultural Research 12.3 (2008): 207–29. Print.
Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge:
Polity, 2017. Print.
Ventzislavov, Rossen. “Idle Arts: Reconsidering the
Curator.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72.1
(2014): 83–93. Print.
Welsch, Wolfgang. Undoing Aesthetics. London:
Sage, 1997. Print.
Zhao, Xuan, Nilfour Salehi, Sasha Naranjit, Sara
Alwaalan, Stephen Voida, and Dan Cosley. “The
Many Faces of Facebook: Experiencing Social
Media as Performance, Exhibition, and Personal
Archive.” CHI ’13 (2013): 1–10. Print.
Ziarek, Krzysztof. “The Work of Art in the Age of
its Electronic Mutability.” Walter Benjamin and Art.
Ed. Andrew Benjamin. London: Continuum, 2015.
209–25. Print.
Zuboff, Shoshana. Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight
for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. Print.

Jean-Philippe Deranty
Department of Philosophy
Level 2, The Australian Hearing Hub
16 University Avenue
Macquarie University
NSW 2109
Australia
E-mail: jp.deranty@mq.edu.au

Michael J. Olson
Department of Philosophy
Marquette Hall
1217 W Wisconsin Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53233
USA
E-mail: michael.olson@mq.edu.au