Opening page…
The aura on your screen
You know the Sistine Chapel from images. If you went, what exactly would you be going for?
An image can show you almost everything about a place except being there.
Your answer
A little context
You could find the ceiling on your phone in seconds and zoom in until Adam's fingertip fills the screen, seeing it better than anyone on the chapel floor. People still queue for hours in the Roman heat to stand under it for a few minutes, among thousands of others, while guards call for silence.
Read alongside it1
ReadingThat which withersEven 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… One might subsume the eliminated element in the term "aura" and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.
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… One might subsume the eliminated element in the term "aura" and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.
Nearby questions
- Does knowing change it?A piece of writing moves you to tears. Then you learn a machine wrote every word. Does that change it?
- What would you still love if no one could ever see you loving it?Private pleasure, public approval, and the preferences that survive without an audience.
- Can something ugly be great art?Goya's black paintings, a scream in a symphony, a novel built to bore you. Some of the most admired work is hard to enjoy.
- The blade and the canvasIf you were angry enough at what it stood for, could you ever be right to put a blade through a painting?
- Can you separate the art from the artist?The work that changed your life was made by someone who did terrible things. Nothing in it has changed, except what you know.
