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In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin has an uncanny ability to foreshadow the discourse concerning mass production in the digital age. Remove his work from the timestamp of his Marxist / Socialist underpinnings and set him up with a word processor and a digicam and we’ve got a relevant op-ed for the New York Times on the lost aura of art in the new millennium.
Indeed, we have reached the pinnacle of his expectation. With digital reproduction it is impossible to distinguish the replica from the original. Does it even make sense to use the term “original” while talking about digital mediums? What of our auras?
I look around me in search of something original that I own. Sadly (though not surprisingly), I can only be sure that a couple paintings and maybe a clay pot are, in fact, unique. Am I bothered? Not really. Am I detached somehow from the analogness of life? I don’t think so. But, how would I know for sure? I’ve never really known any different.
Certainly, digital mediums have changed and disrupted the course of art and communication but have we completely lost touch with what is special about the making of art and about the viewing of it? Of course, there are problems (illegal distribution, intellectual property, digital manipulation (see photos) blah blah) but I’m not so sure that the Ludities have the game cornered just yet. Accessibility is a word that all socialists should love. Digital has done more to make art, literature… knowledge accessible than any other innovation in human history. Now that can only improve our auras.
Credit to Hany Farid at Dartmouth for a nice collection of manipulated imagery:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/