Benjamin is guided by an emphatic understanding of “art”.

Interviewee: Roger Behrens

In doing so, Benjamin is guided by an emphatic understanding of “art”, of the “work of art”; it is thus not a problem for him to take film or radio as forms of art. But for Benjamin this is not aesthetically relevant, but politically. Aesthetically, Benjamin would have had to see film as design and not an art form, namely in terms of an “aestheticizing of politics”. After all, this is what Benjamin hints at with his thesis on the loss of aura: the integration of art into society as mere design or styling. But he is far more interested in Surrealism and Charlie Chaplin than in Bauhaus and the typography of the billboard posters of the time.