In the late-twentieth-century television program Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger proceeded from and developed the themes of Benjamin's essay to explain the contemporary representations of social class and racial caste inherent to the politics and production of art. That in transforming a work of art into a commodity, the modern means of artistic production and of artistic reproduction have destroyed the aesthetic, cultural, and political authority of art: "For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free," because they are commercial products that lack the aura of authenticity of the original objet d'art.[12]
A paralipomena of Benjamin's "Work of Art..." called a "A Short History of Photography", read together with the main-essay, provide a theoretical basis for Susan Sontag's well-known monograph, On Photography.[13][14][15][16]
Ideas initially presented in this article also inform Marshall McLuhan's famous slogan or conception that "the medium is the message".[17]
