The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

(if: $intro_read is 1)[Great you've read it. On to business. Shortly Ross will show you how to make a Text Adventure or rather how he and <a target="_blank" href="http://domesticscience.org.uk">Domestic Science</a> like to call it, (text-style:"bold")[Interactive Non-Fiction], using a WebApp called <a href="http://twinery.org/" target="_blank">Twine</a>. (text-style:"bold")[ArtGym] seems to be about exercise as a curatorial metaphor of the use-value of art; perhaps being part of a healthy lifestyle or an essential part of well-being . There's a general notion in secular societies that art is good for you. It probably comes from the ritualistic and spiritual origins of art. Part of art is (text-style:"bold")[thinking] about the world or your place in it. As well as expressing yourself you can express how you and others think. It's also about thinking about what art is or could be, who makes it, who allows you to make it, whether its a good idea or what you should make it with. It could be about questioning what art is or whether the history of art or art itself is worth looking at. <img width="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cc/Benjamin-sm.jpg/220px-Benjamin-sm.jpg"> We are going to make some Interactive Non-Fiction with Twine about art and the internet by thinking about an essay by the influential writer and thinker <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin">Walter Benjamin</a> (text-style:"bold")[The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction], something that he wrote in 1936. It's pretty common for an artist to reference a cult piece of critical writing from the past like this and reflect on the present through it. The internet is changing how people make art and think about it. It's changing alot of things, and not all good. It can make you creative but it might be controlling what you do or letting other people control what you do. Ross made a short Adventure to introduce the idea of a <a href="http://domesticscience.org.uk/WorksOfArt.html" target="_blank">Walter Benjamin App</a> Let's [[get started|getting started]] on finding out about Walter and some of his and other related writing. Then we can <a target="_blank" href="http://twinery.org/2">start making our own</a>. By the way, if you think we are wrong about text adventures, go and moderate <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game">this page</a>. That's what the internet is good at. Crowd sourcing opinion.] (else:)[Today we are going to make a [[Text Adventure|TextAdventure101]] about (text-style:"bold")[Walter Benjamin] for TATE Liverpool's <a target="_blank" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/display/art-gym">ArtGym</a>. Shortly, an Artist called <a href="http://cheapjack.org.uk" target="_blank">Ross Dalziel</a> from the artist collective <a target="_blank" href="http://domesticscience.org.uk">Domestic Science</a> will help you do that. He's probably already talked to you. You may want to follow the blue link above if you don't know what a Text Adventure is which is likely if you are young. Or you want to just see if you think we are wrong about it. Then come back. To get back & forwards you can use two arrows that will appear to the left of the text.] (set: $intro_read to 0)

(text-style: "italic")["Within major historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of being of the human collective, there are also changes in the manner of it's sense perception"] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

(text-style: "italic")["In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again. Such copying was also done by pupils as an artistic exercise, by masters in order to give works wider circulation, ultimately by anyone seeking to make money. Technological reproduction of the works of art is something else, something that has been practised intermittently throughout history, at widely seperated intervals throughout history, at widely seperated intervals though with growing intensity." "Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes"] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

(text-style: "italic")["With lithography reproductive technology reaches a radically new stage...However, in these early days it was outstripped..by photography. With photography, in the process of pictorial reproduction the hand was for the first time relieved of the principal artistic responsibilities" "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." "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. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by the film." ] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

(text-style: "italic")[Just as water, gas and electric power comes to us from afar and enter our homes with almost no effort on our part, there serving our needs, so we shall be supplied with pictures or sound sequences that, at the touch of a button, almost wave of the hand, arrive and likewise depart ] (text-style: "bold")[Paul Valéry]

(text-style: "italic")["We can say: what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced technological means is it's [[aura|Aura]]" "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. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.... ..technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room." "..the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object."] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

(text-style: "italic")[ ] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

Walter uses the idea of 'aura' to represent how a work of art is 'genuine': what is the thing that makes it unique? An art object is often reverred or valued from the early medieval period when it was part of ritual and then religion, to the present day in secular societies where it is valued as of 'cultural importance'. This affords most art that is collected in public galleries or private collections or the 'art market' a form of authority (text-style:"italic")["What starts to wobble thus is the authority of the Thing" "..that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: 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."] What is 'aura' in the age of the internet? The server farm the image is hosted on? The device it is displayed on? What if you made an adventure about the journey of a piece of art from artist to internet?

What's happening? * The rapid development of network culture and the commodification and control of knowledge and information * A controlling surveillance society * People as not only consumers but products (Facebook) * Complete colonisation of capitalism as the main economic driver of global society alongside ever extreme forms of discrepancy between rich and poor. * Dangerous forms of extremism and an increased development of an un-empowered underclass. * Fear of social migration

You are in the library of (text-style:"bold")[The Work of Art in the Age of the Internet]. You can see print outs from Walter Benjamin and other writers, artists and thinkers spread out across a huge table. [[A pile of Walter Benjamin Quotes|WalterLibrary]] [[Something by Marshall McLuhan|Marshall1]] [[A quote from Glenn Gould|GlennGould1]] [[Quotes from Paul Valery chosen by Walter|PaulValery]]

The internet does not just reproduce art but makes art that in its very nature is reproducible non-genuine and without authority. It is entirely free from the control of tradition and yet the internet itself is in danger (and is already really) of being completely controlled by commercial driven interests and government organisations like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Communications_Headquarters" target="_blank">GCHQ</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29&redirect=no" target="_blank" >PRISM</a>. It would seem like more than any point in history anyone can be an artist, make their work from a thousand YouTube clips or ebay sales and exhibit it to millions without the permission of the art establishment. The rise of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/DanAndPhilGAMES" target="_blank">YouTube broadcast superstars</a> often takes place without mainstream media (generally the ageing media worker industry of Newspapers and Television) approval and often whole movements of creativity appear and vanish without the knowledge of the cultural establishment. Many of them probably should vanish. But regardless it is all recorded somewhere, even if deleted. There's a big screen over here with [[choices about internet art|choices]]

This is an imaginary gallery of art on the internet as Walter Benjamin might have imagined and wandered through like a networked [[Flâneur|Flaneur]]. It's interesting that the internet's infrastructure was of military origin: indeed many think of the internet as a product of the ongoing militarization of all civic life and that it's freedom attempted by people like Tim Berners Lee open-sourcing of markup-language, could become a form of control unless we fight against things like the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/investigatory-powers-bill-email-your-mp/">Investigatory Powers Bill</a> (text-style:"italic")["Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system"] ART What is truly internet Benjamin friendly born-digital art? What would he make of the ArtGym? And what would he have made of <a target = "_blank" href="http://granbyworkshop.co.uk/">Assemble's Granby Workshop</a> [[A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould - Cory ArcAngel|Cory1]] [[24 Dances for the Electric Piano|24Dances]] <a target = "_blank" href="http://atooltodeceiveandslaughter.com">A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter</a> This art object perpetually attempts to sell itself on eBay. <a target = "_blank" href="http://tv.giphy.com/glitch">Glitch Aesthetics</a> <a target = "_blank" href="http://tv.giphy.com/cat">Cats</a>

This is a Library of quotes from Walter's (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] You could read through them and think about art or the internet and preferably both. Then think of a story or game about them [[Historical Perception|Historical sense perception]] [[Always Reproducibile|Always Reproducible]] [[Photography|Photography]] [[On an object's Aura|Aura1]] [[On blogging?|On Writing]] [[On Cameramen and Painting|On Cameramen and Painting]] [[Painting|Painting]] [[More on Film|More on Film]] [[Mass & Film|Mass & Film]] [[On War and Technology|On War and Technology]]

Glenn Gould famously gave up conventional performance in favour of editing performances electronically on records and CD's. He was actually an early adoptor of digital creativity perhaps despite but more likely because of his obsession with Bach... (text-style: "italic")["One of the certain effects of the electronic age is that it will forever change the values that we attach to art. In fact the vocabulary of aesthetic criteria that has been developed since the Renaissance is mostly concerned with terms that are proving to have little validity for the examination of electronic culture. I refer to such terms as 'imitation', 'invention', and above all, 'originality', which in recent times ... are no longer capable of conveying the precise analytical concepts they once represented." "Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple authorship and responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer and indeed the consumer overlap Implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multi level participation in creative process"] (text-style: "bold")[Glenn Gould] (text-style: "italic")[Glenn Gould Strauss and the Electronic Future] 1964

<img width="200" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/Paul_Val%C3%A9ry.jpg/800px-Paul_Val%C3%A9ry.jpg"> <a target="_blank" ref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Val%C3%A9ry">Paul Valéry</a> aka Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry, was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. He was a polymath and possibly an early blogger writing entries in his "Cahiers" every day for over 50 years. Walter quoted him to frame his work's interest in art and aesthetics and technology's role within it. (text-style: "italic")["The establishment of the fine arts and their division into various categories go back to a time that differ radically from ours and to people whose power over things and circumstances was minute in comparison with our own. However the astounding growth that our resources have undergone in terms of their precision and adaptability will in the near future confront us with very radical changes indeed in the ancient industry of the beautiful. In all arts there is a physical component that cannot continue to be considered and treated in the same way as before; no longer can it escape the effects of modern knowledge. Neither matter, nor space, nor time is what, up until (print: 2015 - 1934) years ago, it always was. We must be prepared" ] (text-style: "bold")[Paul Valéry] (text-style: "italic")[Pieces sur l'art] 1934 (text-style: "italic")[Just as water, gas and electric power comes to us from afar and enter our homes with almost no effort on our part, there serving our needs, so we shall be supplied with pictures or sound sequences that, at the touch of a button, almost wave of the hand, arrive and likewise depart ] (text-style: "bold")[Paul Valéry]

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes

(text-style:"italic")["For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy- nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship. In the Soviet Union work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of a man’s ability to perform the work. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property."] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

Walter thought alot about the changes going on in society, technology, politics in his time in the 1930's and about how that changed art; how it was made and how we perceive it. He thought about and did alot of things (some quite Rock 'n Roll like fighting Fascism and doing drugs and some things not always that good) and was even an early live <a target="_blank" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/radio-on-rediscovering-walter-benjamins-broadcasts">Radio Broadcaster</a>. In many ways he articulated the beginning of how we think about and make art today not to mention some prophetic thinking about the implications of capitalism. There's a nice article about him, revealing the more complicated aspects of his life as the original "Flaneur" <a target="_blank" href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/fallen-angel-13671.html">here</a> His thinking in his work (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] which he wrote in 1936 was about how technology challenged the authority of art production and so the politics of art itself. He also saw this shift as being part of huge changes in European society of the time; the rise of fascism and industrialisation, the development of a challenge to capitalism through Marxism and the communist project and the increased <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletarianization">Proletarianization</a> of humanity. Today we live in a [[world arguably undergoing similar upheaval|TheWorld]] and it's remarkable just how you much his thinking resonates with the world, technology and art today. You can read quotes from his work if you enter the virtual [[ArtGym Library|Library here]] here. Photography, radio and film where the technologies transforming art and society from his perspective in 1936. Replace that with how the internet is changing the way we make and perceive art now and it seems spookily prophetic. The implication of his essay is that art is not just a form of free expression; it's bound up with the material and political circumstances of it's production. Once art is distributed and reproduced to this degree, what art 'is' begins to 'wobble' into something different. Whether this explains cats on the internet powered by vast farms of machines constantly turned on we dont know. What do you think? [[Look at some art on the internet|TheInternet]]

(text-style: "italic")["How does the cameraman compare with the painter? The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art." ] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

(text-style:"bold")[What is a Text Adventure?] <img src="http://www.textadventuretime.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/082010_choose_your_own_adventure_4.jpg" width="200"> It's alot like a choose your own adventure book if you know what one of those is. You may or may not. You read a story and then are directed to a particular page for the next part of the story. So you decide on the order you read it. In our form of simple text adventure we will use a webapp called (text-style:"bold")[Twine 2] to make links and use the 2 grey arrows to the left of the text to go back and forwards in the story. <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c9/ElJard%C3%ADnDeSenderosQueSeBifurcan.jpg/200px-ElJard%C3%ADnDeSenderosQueSeBifurcan.jpg" width="200"> It's a kind of hyper-text. The book pictured above is a work by the poet Jorge Luis Borges and is often thought of as a precursor of hyper-text. The Hyper-text we know is what we are reading now: webpages. They allow us to link to different pages of content. So click on this link and close the tab afterwards: <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Forking_Paths">html</a> (text-style:"bold")[html] is a 'mark-up language' that describes the behaviour of hyper-text so you can embed images, play music or link to another web-page. We will use a kind of mark-up language in a webapp called Twine. But you can also use (text-style:"bold")[html] mark-up in Twine. Once upon a time there where games made by creative individuals with no budget, no images and nothing but the urge to take part in an emerging culture way before the 'games industry'. You can read about the <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game">wikipedia history of Text Adventures here</a> but also read <a href="http://www.textadventuretime.co.uk/2015/05/28/hit-troll-with-axe-a-zork-review/#more-179" target="_blank">this article by artist Glenn Boulter</a> and also about <a href="http://www.filfre.net/2013/07/the-quill/" target="_blank">The Quill</a> something that tried to make the programming of text adventures easy for non-programmers. In many ways <a href="http://twinery.org/" target="_blank">Twine</a> which we are using today to make our adventure is like the Quill for the internet now. Ok lets [[go back|Start]] (set: $intro_read to 1)

This is a [[portal to Walter|Walter]]. It's really a primer for his work and it's a way to grab quotes that we can reflect on for this workshop. So we've made a Library of his and others work that you can browse and cut and paste into your own adventures in art criticism If you want to go deep you can read the real books on the table in the Gallery. You can also read Walter's Book <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm" target="_blank">online here</a>.

(text-style: "italic")[ ] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

(text-style: "italic")["The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different perspective. The film has enriched our field of perception with methods which can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth in a conversation which had seemed to be taking its course on the surface. ...behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, ... the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones" ] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

(text-style: "italic")["The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one." ] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

(text-style: "italic")["The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production – in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural materrial. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way."] (text-style: "bold")[Walter Benjamin] (text-style: "italic")[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction] 1936

The Flâneur was the archetype artist-wanderer-timewaster and it's thought Benjamin saw the onset of the triumph of consumer capitalism as the death of the Flâneur, and the death of himself, perhaps the most modern of Flâneur's. Ironically perhaps the triumph of the internet (and so consumer capitalism) has made Flâneurs of everyone. This description by Baudelaire sounds like a lurking web surfer to me. (text-style:"italic")["For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas."] (text-style: "bold")[Charles Baudelaire] (text-style: "italic")["The Painter of Modern Life"], (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863. [[Back to the internet gallery|choices]]