Reflection on Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Soooo I really enjoyed reading benji again. He's so interesting. Anyhow...I don't find photographs really that interesting anymore. Anyone can take a picture nowadays and develop/reprint a picture. I suppose that's what makes it less interesting. He talks about how anyone can be a published writer now in the editorials of a newspaper and he's right. We can reproduce in mass quantities now and that is accessible to everyone. I think the problem with reproduction is that everything becomes familiar which means people don't have to use their brains as much because they already know what it is. We no longer really have to imagine because we have moving pictures that already brings us wherever we want to go and draws all the details for us so that we don't have to. Although things like film has engaged us more, I feel that it's made us less interactive with art, especially with paintings. With all the flashiness around us today, being stuck in front of one painting, one image that might take us at least 15 minutes to understand and take in, most people don't have the attention span for that and/or get bored very quickly. Of course, that is all changing now and art is reforming/resurfacing in a new form where viewers can physically interact. It has been said that the best artist steal from others. So then actually, art is just always being reproduced. It can be a photo manipulated or a painting redone abstractly. However, whatever it is, the concept might be the same/similar but it'll still be different. I understand that in film, because the picture is always changing you don't really have time to take it in and contemplate but you can go back to it in your head after the film is finished or go watch it again, just as you could go back and see a painting. As for photos, maybe the first picture that was developed conceptually is different to the third photo that was printed even though it's the same photo. I suppose that's what Benji meant when he quoted Hegel, that because of the mass mechanical reproduction provies, "We are beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine and objects deserving our worship. The impression they produce is one of a more reflective kind, and the emotions they arouse require a higher test..." On that note, I just want to say, the war quote by Marinetti in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war,...I thought it was beautiful.