Image, Ben and Art

How, instead, is he hoping we'll understand both art but also how art functions, and how art is related to politics?

I have read this article 5 or six times now and still keep finding new things! It is exciting! The way I read it before though was in relation to spectator and art, how art has been perceived due to the medium, not art and politics. This time around the scope is political function.
Prior to mass production of media (books, photos, works of art) everything was controlled by high society. Benjamin refers to them as the cult(671). It used to be you had to travel in order to view a work of art, and you had to have a great amount of funding to commission art. Image and texts were items that allowed for the transfer of knowledge and by removing them from the lower classes the higher classes kept power in their realm. Once, texts and art was mass produced hey lost control over this. Part of the pillar that held them up gave way and the elitist fell down a bit. Once mass reproduction unfolded people were able to communicate quickly and easily, organize and transfer knowledge and power.

But also by controlling and regulating art, like they did with film in Germany and Russia, you can control the perception of society. Not just how they view the world but their position in the world. You can keep them blind and ignorant to their own misery.
So controlling art is just another way of social oppression and a way for politicians to keep power.
Reading “Art” and “Image” in Critical Terms for Media Studies

On your blog, summarize quickly what you see to be the main, overall, arguments of each of these pieces. You need not linger over the details of the arguments. (I may, in comments, push you on developing or supporting your summaries.)

Art was not as difficult as the concept of image. Art has turned into media and media has turned into art each on affecting the other over the course of time. I am over simplifying I know but the art article flowed pretty smoothly. The image article was far more complex. We view the image as art, and the image is captured on a medium, but the image itself is just smoke, a catalyst, and an interpretation from the mind’s eye communicated to and through the hand. The image is what has the power in art because of its ambivalence. In the art section they discussed Duchamp’s Fountain. I have seen pictures of this urinal and I have seen many urinals. They are made from a material, have weight, mass, and texture. There shape though is derived from an image that someone had in their mind, an idea that had no physical status in the world until it was shaped from the image and given physical properties. So we can touch the product and the urinal but we can never touch the image of the urinal is what I took from combining these two sections. …It hard to explain clearly but hopefully I will get there by the end of this week.