In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin argued that creating, by mechanical means, multiple copies of something once prized for its singularity and its specific presence in time and space diminished the “authority” and the “authenticity” of the original, whether it was a painting, a sculpture, or the performance of a musical composition. The proliferation of anonymous replicas permitted by twentieth-century technology compromised what Benjamin called the “aura” of the work of art—which he described as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.” Aura “withers” when the work of art is mechanically duplicated, Benjamin warned:
the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of trad ...This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase
Log in
Karen Wilkin is an editor at The Hudson Review and on the faculty at the New York Studio School
more from this author
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 19 May 2001, on page 21
Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com
E-mail to friend(s)