“Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. … Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. … In #photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face.” (WALTER BENJAMIN)
“The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus #photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever.” (WALTER BENJAMIN)
“With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, #photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of #art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of ‘pure’ art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter … An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical 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.” (WALTER BENJAMIN)
“Everyone, with the aid of the DAGUERREOTYPE, will make a view of his castle or country-house: people will form collections of all kinds, which will be the more precious because art cannot imitate their accuracy and perfection of detail. The leisured class will find it a most attractive occupation, although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” (LOUIS DAGUERRE)
“Photography…is neither art nor nonart…” (W.J.T. MITCHELL)
“To fix fleeting reflections is not only impossible, as has been shown by thoroughgoing German research, but to wish to do it is blasphemy. Man is created in the image of God and God’s image cannot be held fast by a human machine. At the most the pious artist—enraptured by heavenly inspiration—may at the higher command of his genius dare to reproduce those divine/human features in an instant of highest dedication, without mechanical help.” (Leipzig CITY ADVERTISER quoted by WALTER BENJAMIN, 1931)
“When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around then that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. #Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations. It is the business of those who are concerned with the theory of the earth, geographers and geologists, to make this fact evident in its various implications. The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine art has a like task to accomplish.” (JOHN DEWEY)
“The very theorists of #photography who have done the most to open up the limitless variety and complexity photographic images invariably wind up at some point declaring an essential teleology, a fixed center to the labyrinth. Photography’s true nature is found in its automatic realism and naturalism, or in its tendency to aestheticize and idealize by rendering things pictorial. It is praised for its incapacity for abstraction, or condemned for its fatal tendency to produce abstractions from human reality. It is declared to be independent of language, or riddled with language. Photography is a record of what we see, or a revelation of what we cannot see, a glimpse of what was previously invisible. Photographs are things we look at, and yet, as Barthes also insists, ‘a photograph is always invisible: it is not what we see.’” (W.J.T. MITCHELL)
“Qualities of sense, those of touch and taste as well as of sight and hearing, have esthetic quality. But they have it not in isolation but in their connections; as interacting, not as simple and separate entities. Nor are connections limited to their own kind, colors with colors, sounds with sounds. Even the utmost in the way of scientific control never succeeds in getting either a “pure” color or a pure spectrum of colors. A ray of light produced under scientific control does not end sharply and with uniformity. It has vague edges and so internal complexity. Moreover, it is projected on a background and only thus does it enter perception. And the background is not merely one of other hues and shades. It has its own qualities. No shadow cast by even the thinnest line is ever homogeneous. It is impossible to isolate a color from light so that no refraction occurs. Even under the most uniform laboratory conditions, a “simple” color will be complex to the extent of having a bluish edge. And the colors used in paintings are not pure spectral colors but are pigments, not projected on the void but applied on a canvas.” (JOHN DEWEY)