mechanical reproduction... finishhhh!!

Read the Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. Write a 300 word analysis of one work of Graphic Design, that you think relates to the themes of the text, and employing quotes, concepts and terminology from the text.

The essay can be found online here.http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

In the essay 'the work of art in the cultural age of mechanical reproduction' by Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin significantly evaluates the role of technology through photography as an instrument of change, How mechanical reproduction has helped share art to the masses and essentially bringing a whole uprising in social economics, art was originally made by the rich for the rich, creating a social divide between the rich and the poor, however with the aid of mechanical reproduction it meant that the poor could also own the same piece of art as the rich person balancing out social economics also helping with educating the poor. I am going to relate this idea to a certain piece of graphic design, the first piece of graphic design which came to me what relates to the themes of the text is the 'keep calm and carry on' poster, and I feel is possibly one of the better examples of mechanical reproduction within graphic design the way it was been reproduced so much it has kind of lost its 'aura' but means it has been shared worldwide and you can pretty much find one of these posters decorating someones bedroom or a small cafe anywhere.

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.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. 

the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced

To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.

The keep calm and carry on poster was origi

Although I do personally hate these posters, or what they have become today, some meaningless poster with bad layout and a cheesy caption replacing the old 'keep calm and carry on',