“Just as there is no smithing in Blacksmith, these communities all evoke an outmoded labor ethic and economic simplicity that no longer exist either in the city or in the village” (Weekes 290). Similar towns situated nearby Backsmith include Watertown, where a fire engulfs a tenement, Bakersville, where two bodies are found buried in a backyard, and Glassboro, where a man dies in a freak, single-car accident (Weekes 290). Furthermore, while searching for the Treadwells the police find a gun and heroine (60). The first whisper of death in the book happens in Blacksmith when a Mylex-suited man collapses and dies while trying to decontaminate the elementary school (40). However, the connotations of the quaint and homegrown name “Blacksmith” are merely ruses. Even Jack doesn’t foresee violence in his little town, claiming that death in Blacksmith, when compared with the fatal urban atmosphere, is “nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful” (76). He lives in a town named Blacksmith, which is a ‘‘name that advertises old-fashioned values and country goodness’’ and indicates its inhabitants are ‘‘protected from the violence of the inner cities” (Keesey 135). In terms of Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, Jack Gladney much prefers a mechanical reproduction to an aura, valuing simulation and repetition over unique experiences. For example, since the advent of mechanical reproduction and mass distribution, the common person can now enjoy the Mona Lisa as it hangs in their living room-her half smile is no longer restricted to the people who can afford to visit the Louvre. Mechanical reproductions of artwork, such as pictures in books, advertisements, and posters, equalize the “playing field,” allowing art to be evaluated based on the art itself rather than political ties or hierarchical consignments. “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (Benjamin IV) on which it was forced to rely and allows for mass consumption. The aura, the artwork’s authenticity, by definition, cannot be reproduced and, therefore, the mechanical reproduction and mass distribution of art obliterates any aura a piece of artwork might have. Thus, art is no longer evaluated based on innovation, authorship, or general quality but by history, ownership, and lineage, making the existence and value of art ritualistic, formulaic, and ultimately arbitrary. Benjamin proposes that the aura of art exists in its capitalist, elitist quality of uniqueness, that part of what makes art, well, art is the fact that it is belongs to the elite and the poor are deprived of it. Whether a work of art or natural landscape, we confront it in one place and only one place: ” (Nichols 628). “The aura of an object compels attention. This “aura” exists in the art’s authenticity and its place in the realm of tradition. German cultural critic Walter Benjamin discusses in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” the effects of mechanical reproduction in regards to the “aura” of art.
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