![]() ![]() Reproductions are not just other objects: they degrade the aura of the original.īut while aura is to be found in authenticity, Benjamin is very careful to tether it to religious life. As Benjamin writes, "he technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition," which is to say, it takes the object out of the time and place in which it was made. The aura that issues from apprehending the Sistine Chapel in the state of its history, in the Vatican, dissipates with each reproduction. Reproduction can also transport the original to "situations where it would be out of reach for the original itself (Benjamin 220)," for example, when the Sistine Chapel is reproduced in middle school civilizations textbooks. Inherent in the medium of photography is the process of reproduction: a negative can be used to produce an infinite number of prints, none of which can really be called an 'original.' Technologies such as the lithograph and the photograph allow the work of art to be reproduced endlessly, and not only reproduced- but allow it to be seen better, as in process reproduction, which can enlarge an original. But for Benjamin there is a categorical difference between the reproduction the Greeks were capable of and the technical reproduction we are capable of. To be sure, technologies of reproduction have always existed. As Benjamin writes, "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be (Benjamin 220)." Under modernity aura becomes degraded: in the proliferation of reproductions, the authority of the original is obliterated. ![]() A replica of an entire Dutch village has been built in the south of Japan but it is throughly without aura: it lacks the tradition of the former, the history of the former, it is ersatz and in this sense inauthentic. ![]() The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel has an aura- and an authority- which derives not only from its formal qualities but the fact of its being in the Vatican, having lasted five centuries, having been painted by the hand of Michelangelo, and even more than that, that it cannot ever be duplicated. The aura of a work issues from the presence it has: from being situated squarely in a particular space and having a certain history, or in other words, its authenticity. As Miriam Hansen argues, however, the tension in Benjamin between the liberatory potential of mass media and the vulgarity it represents is never fully resolved (Hansen 187). In this way Benjamin means to approach both aesthetics and ethics and, in doing so, to approach what mass media might mean as the grounds for a revolutionary politics. Aura also, however, refers to the model of a certain kind of intersubjective experience, in the experience of an object gazing back at one. Aura for him refers first and foremostly to a certain kind of aesthetic presence of art, grounded in religious experience, and eliminated by the modern development of the technologies of reproduction-photography and especially film. This involvement with authenticity and reproduction squarely ensconces Benjamin in an older debate over the nature of the original and the copy, which dates to Plato and continues through today in (amongst others) Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze.īenjamin's entrypoint to aura is his concern with technical reproducibility. ' Aura' refers to the authority held by the unique, original work, which under modernity is liquidated by the techniques of mass reproduction. Although this usage predates Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the use of the term in contemporary media studies is dominated by the specter of Benjamin and by his elaboration of the term here and in his work on the storyteller and Baudelaire. The word aura dates to antiquity (Latin, 'breath' or 'breeze later, 'a subtle emanation from any substance') and has been used in numerous ways, not least to describe the existence of electromagnetic fields around the human body (OED). "Some company recently was interested in buying my 'aura,' they didn't want my product."Īndy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol ![]()
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