Every field has certain works that everyone working the field is expected to be familiar with. In art history, one of those is Walter Benjamin's 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
Every field also has students who make it all the way through their degree program without actually reading those fundamental works. In this case, that would be me. I absorbed the major points of Benjamin's essay from seeing it repeatedly mentioned in other works I read (particularly the idea of the "aura," or as I prefer to call it "the cult of the original") and skipped actually reading it. But when I saw it referenced in Jordan S. Carroll's Hugo Award-winning book Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (2025, Best Related Work), I decided the time had come to actually read it.
I think it was worth reading. It did have quite a lot on the "aura," which I was already aware of, but it also contained a lot of material on film, surrealism, Dada, Futurism, and the differing ways that art was politicized in fascism and communism. I found the following quote, about the relationship between captions and photographs, and then how this is also related to movies, to be particularly interesting.
[Since the introduction of photography], captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film[,] where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.
ETA: The lines that Carroll was referencing come from the penultimate sentences of Benjamin's essay, where he says "[Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic." The ultimate sentence, which Carroll doesn't mention (or at least hasn't so far) is "Communism responds by politicizing art."
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