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
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?
- Is your taste yours?What would you still love if no one could ever see you loving it?
- Must great art be beautiful?Can something ugly be great art?
- 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?
- The maker inside the madeCan you separate the art from the artist?
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.