Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception… as film is able to do today… And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception… as film is able to do today… And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

– Walter Benjamin –

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

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