Benjamin Walter

week 5

To a common audience art is colourful paint brushed onto a canvass in order to create a beautiful image. However I don’t particularly agree I think that even with out a paint brush and canvass many of us can create our own pieces of artwork. To me art is anything that you can produce that has an effect on someone. That encourages thoughts or displays a story. I’m not suggesting that professional artists don’t create pieces that are awe inspiring and quite powerful but as the world is constantly changing especially in the way we communicate such as through the internet there are more opportunities for people to express them selves through their versions of art. I think art can be defined only by those that create it. If someone digitally produces a video that they feel is art because they have constructed it to impose emotions on an audience then it is art. Art can be found in music, simple drawings or even in the editing of reality, such as photo manipulation.

Authentic means not false or copied. If a photo image is imported into photo shop then it is a copy of the original thus making it unauthentic. Photo shop is generally used to edited and manipulate images and if an image is changed from its original then it is no longer the authentic photo or image that was originally produced.

Walter Benjamin had a belief that art work inferred an experience of awe for those who viewed it but he also believed that mechanical reproductions destroyed this awe in art. However I personally find that his definition of art is quite cold. I think that any thing created with passion and emotion and visual appeal that infers emotions in another person is art. To me that’s art work of an aura. Also mechanical reproduction like photo shopping images can also be creating art. A photograph that has been filled with emotion and a story also has an aura and thus is a work of art.