Friday, March 9, 2012

Downfall of Lithography


Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
, 1936 
     Lithography had a meaningful place in history and emerged with great potential, equivalent to the emergence of engraving and etching in the Middle Ages. Lithography was received with much interest due to it’s unique characteristics: it was a direct process, helping put reproducible art forms on the art market. As useful as lithography came to be, it was eventually abandoned and replaced by photography. Though lithography is certainly far from a lost art, it did lose out to the emergence of the camera, since they were both competitors in similar markets. The art of reproduction was in photography’s favor as the lens lacked the ability to view what is in front of it non-objectively, and was also convenient when it came to time restraints. With photography, one could capture and “...keep pace with speech.”



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