Frank Kogan

So, not having read the Benjamin in several decades, I'll just respond to this as if it were Mark's ideas (though I realize that they're not):

It's an argument about knowledge, and I don't get it.

(1) You're saying that it's owing to my not having a unique original at hand that I therefore know less about the social context that created Britney's Blackout than I do about the social context that created a unique individual 17th century Dutch painting I see in a gallery?

(2) Are you saying that I would understand your ideas better if I were to read them in your handwriting than to read them on a message board, again because the handwriting brings us closer to the conditions of how it was produced?

(3) What about the social context of use? Are you saying that people who danced to a live band in the 1920s understand the social context of their dancing better than people who dance to a DJ now?

Anyway, it may be true that in general modern cosmopolitanism means that we have less of a feel for what's being said to us or given to us as culture than we would have living in a smaller world 600 years ago, but the singularity and the uniqueness of the artwork would have nothing to do with it. Rather, it's the fact that artworks and expressions travel that would be the critical factor, mass reproduction being merely a means that helps them to travel. And of course through this travel we get to know more about people and ideas that would formerly have been different, so even if maybe we know less about the music we're hearing, since it wasn't made by the person next door, we know way way way more about music that was made 7,000 miles away, and are closer to it.