The Concept of Aura
Insider #86 with the concept of aura and the recurring question of who serves whom.
Note: This is one part of a series of posts on the essay by Walter Benjamin. Read here: The Role of Art in the Age of 'Virtual Reproduction' | The Concept of Aura | What is Art keeps changing | Free Contemplation of Art | Freewriting | Everyone should own art
Dear Insider,
The idea of art is in a state of great flux. For many artists, including myself, this is an existential crisis. To better understand myself and my work, I am reading Walter Benjamin’s 1936 work, The Role of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Last week, I shared my thoughts from Chapters I and II.
The main points were:
that art has always been reproducible, but
mechanical reproduction (lithography and photography) in the 1930s changed the idea of art, and
the role it plays in our world.
In today’s post, the concept of aura and the recurring question of who serves whom.
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Chapter III
In the previous part, I explained aura as arising from the historicity of a work of art. This connection to its history, to a tradition it follows as well as builds upon, is the first thing destroyed by the technological ability to reproduce it infinitely and effortlessly.
Consider what it means to see the Mona Lisa only at the Louvre in Paris, versus being able to hang a cheap poster on your wall, versus being able to alter the original drawing as per your wish.
Instead of the one story of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous work, each reproduction is now its own story, with its own value and context and meaning in the world of each viewer.
Our ability to do this is matched by the social conditions that cultivate our desire to do this thing. To take something and make it ours. To bring it closer to our own experience. To not simply accept the work of art as it is, but to mould it to our own self-expression.
“Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”
In 1936, Walter Benjamin saw in socialism the desire of the “masses to bring things closer”. It is interesting to me that in 2023, it is our hyper-individualism taking the next step. We are no longer content to simply bring things closer. It is now our self-granted right to reshape the world - and therefore all of its art - in our own image. Think: a filter, a caption, a meme, a redesign, or even just a retweet.
“To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object.”
And
“The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope.”
Question: Is my Tiny People on the Trains print an adjustment of reality to the masses or does its existence suggest the adjustment of the masses to reality?
Chapter IV
“An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who saw it as a threatening idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, i.e. its aura.”
According to Walter Benjamin, the first value of art was its ritual value. The oldest works of art were created in the service of ritual - first magical, then religious.
I wonder how much he knew of prehistoric cave paintings - such as in Lascaux, where numerous paintings of animals are dated to over 17,000 years ago.