Justin, Benjamin

"Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the real of the "beautiful semblance" which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive." (Benjamin, p. 27)

This passage made me think of the only picture I've ever drawn and been proud of. I found a photograph on the internet of a man during the civil rights movement standing in a crowd of people. His hand covered his face and he was very visibly distraught. I felt really compelled to try and draw him, and with no training or natural talent, I found it very difficult to capture the subject's emotion. But I stayed determined, and after a very long time, I had a respectable, small-scale, pencil-drawn copy of this photograph. The only way I was able to do it was to go very slowly and to draw what I saw, not what I thought I saw.I think the process relates to what Benjamin was talking about in this passage, because it's the attempt to translate a visible emotion into an act of art. However, it is done by fooling the artist. In a way, I was fooling myself into drawing a bigger picture by focusing on each small line. If I'd tried to draw the lines in a continuous motion, like an actor on stage, I would have fouled up over and over. Was my creation art? Or can an artist only be seen as someone who is a master of a craft.
In a way, I think that the art comes from the intention. Although perhaps the actor doesn't have the ability to create the emotion himself, the director finds a way to create something beautiful by his own techniques. In this instance, he alone is the artist. In my case, though there may be a slight difference, I think that my mind was the director, and my hand the actor. My mind fooled my hand into creating something beautiful, despite my hand's incapabilities. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction is at a high, because those who aren't masters of a craft have a chance to display their perspectives through a medium that is arguably the most significant in history.