Art & Creativity Quote by Walter Benjamin

Benjamin is diagnosing a modern media ecology where art loses its old aura of shared ritual and instead becomes content: plentiful, portable, and socially optional. When an art form stops carrying communal weight, the public’s relationship to it splits. “Enjoyment” becomes a frictionless habit - consuming what already reads as familiar, legible, and safe. “Criticism” gets outsourced to the moment we feel challenged, because the new arrives not as pleasure but as an interruption of competence. You don’t just dislike it; you feel accused by it.

The bite in his phrasing is that this isn’t a story about taste being “bad.” It’s about attention being reorganized. The “conventional” can be enjoyed uncritically because it asks nothing beyond recognition; it flatters the viewer’s existing categories. The “truly new” triggers aversion because it withholds that recognition and exposes how much of enjoyment is really the comfort of already knowing how to respond. Benjamin suggests that when art’s social stakes decline, the public no longer needs art to orient itself, so novelty becomes a nuisance rather than a necessity.

Context matters: Benjamin is writing in the shadow of mass reproduction, commercial entertainment, and rising fascism - a period when images and narratives were becoming industrial tools. His subtext is political as much as aesthetic. If the new is reflexively treated as suspect, then the culture becomes easy to steer: people relax into the conventional, while anything that might re-train perception gets quarantined as “difficult,” “pretentious,” or worse, “degenerate.”