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“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

Paul Valery (from Piéces sur L'Art, 1931)

"[M]echanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics."

Walter  Benjamin (from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936)


Greetings from Angelus novus

I hang nobly on the wall

and look no one in the eye

I've been sent from heaven

An angelman am I.




Man is well within my realm

I take little interest in his case

I am protected by the Almighty

and have no need of any face.




The world from which I come

is measured, deep and clear

what keeps me of a piece

is a wonder, so it here appears.




In my heart stands the town

where God sent me to dwell.

The angel who bears this seal

Falls not beneath its spell.




My wing is poised to beat

but I would gladly return home

were I to stay to the end of days

I would still be this forlorn.




My gaze is never vacant

my eye pitchdark and full

I know what I must announce

and many other things as well.




I am an unsymbolic thing

what I am I mean

you turn the magic ring in vain

there is no sense to me.

Gerhard Scholem



There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees on single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

From Walter Benjamin 1940 work, "On the Concept of History,"