Chapter Three: Aura
In early 1940 Walter Benjamin was living in Paris, having just been released from a prison camp south of the city. As a Jew, his German citizenship had been stripped from him by the Nazis the previous year, leaving him without a nationality or a legal right to be in France. As the Nazis forced their way into France, Benjamin was forced to flee by land. He traveled south, narrowly escaping the Nazis as they entered Paris and came searching for him. He traveled through the Pyrenees mountains carrying his only remaining belongings as well as a black leather suitcase full of papers and writings that he wouldn’t be parted from. He crossed the Spanish border into, he thought, safety.
Some of those papers in the suitcase might well have included a copy of his important essay from five years earlier, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Perhaps more than any other essay about art in the 20th century, this essay has had a profound and wide-reaching impact on the way people think about art and how it is spread across the world. Many common ideas about an artwork’s “aura”, about the role of history and politics in our reception of art, and about the impact of the “reproducibility” of art on how we view it all come from this essay, and they have only become more relevant today, especially as we settle into a world driven by an image-circulation system we call “the internet”.
The essay is in many parts and makes a range of arguments that are sometimes easy to misunderstand. This is due to the way they occasionally appear more simple than they actually are, which is partly due to the plainness of Benjamin’s writing. The most common misapprehension about Benjamin’s essay is that Benjamin’s conception of art’s lost “aura” at the hands of mechanical reproduction is either a wholly positive or negative effect. By “mechanical reproduction”, we might take Benjamin to mean medieval Chinese woodcut printing or the Gutenberg printing press as much as the lithography, photography, and automated printers of Benjamin’s time, or the websites and social media of our own. It is too simple to say that Benjamin thinks that the ability to “mechanically” reproduce artwork is a bad thing because it destroys the “aura” of an original work of art. In fact, Benjamin suggests, the destruction of aura might in some ways be considered a positive, democratizing force on art and politics.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (sometimes translated as “Technical Reproducibility”) requires close attention in order to unpick what might seem like a simple argument. But some things from the essay have stuck around for a long time in the world of art, and the idea that old paintings have an aura that can be destroyed by reproduction is the main one. What this “aura” consists of is a more difficult question. Who can see or feel the aura? How is it made? What is it made of? Why does reproducing art destroy it? It can help to apply these questions to a particular work of art to work out some answers and begin to explore the more advanced depths of the essay. Take the Mona Lisa, for instance.
da Vinci, Leonardo. Mona Lisa. 1503, Louvre Museum, Paris.
The painting Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci sits in the Louvre Museum in Paris behind an inch of bulletproof glass. Tourists line up for long periods of time to see the painting even amid bustling crowds and distanced by a security cordon, stretching to get a glimpse of a portrait that is only two and a half feet tall. Many people try to get a photo of the Mona Lisa while they’re there, even though high quality photos are freely available online or in books like this one.
Grigas, Victor. Crowd Looking at the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Photograph. 25 June 2014. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Why? Why do people from every continent seek out this painting from 1503 of a seated woman and cram into uncomfortable surroundings to look at it from a distance and take photos of it in person? It’s a question that goes right to the heart of Benjamin’s essay. Benjamin would say that the painting has aura, a kind of residue of history that exists only in the original copy. To get a proper understanding of aura, you’ll need to read Benjamin’s essay in full. But take note here of the ways that aura is capable of making people act – even “rational”, modern people – unusually. We might describe people’s relationship to images here as irrational, but we might also notice that it’s one that matches the behavior of our ancient ancestors towards images, as W.J.T. Mitchell argues in What Do Pictures Want?. It’s also important to note here that even though the Mona Lisa can be mechanically reproduced, it has somehow retained its aura (perhaps even gained some), suggesting a limit to Benjamin’s theory.
Publicity photo of Charlie Chaplin for the film Modern Times (1936).
An illuminating artwork to look at alongside “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a seminal (and hilarious) film made by Charlie Chaplin in 1935 and released in 1936, around the same time as Benjamin’s essay. The film, named Modern Times, is about the impact of the modern world on the modern mind and the modern worker, and has been written about as both an example of great political art and great comedy. If mechanical reproduction is destroying the aura of art, what is it doing to us as people and a society? This film offers some answers to that question, and the film and the essay can illuminate one another in interesting ways as a result. The film is also a great introduction to the impact of mechanical reproduction and labor in the 20th century, the topic of our final chapter.
By the time Walter Benjamin was being pursued by the Nazis through France, Charlie Chaplin was making a film called The Great Dictator. It’s another good companion to Benjamin’s essay because it’s possible to think of it in terms of aura in a different way. Chaplin’s parody of Hitler, Adenoid Hynkel, seems to be a “reproduction” of Hitler that attacks the aura that Hitler’s own filmic propaganda created so effectively (more on that in the next chapter): sometimes known as the “cult of the führer”. The political nature of this aura-attack is already predicted by Benjamin at the end of his essay when he says that after aura is destroyed art “begins to be based on another practice – politics”.
Unfortunately for Walter Benjamin, he would not escape the violence that Hitler promised to Jews in his propaganda. When Benjamin was across the border into Spain, the group of Jewish refugees Benjamin travelled with were detained by police. Awaiting deportation back to France and into Nazi hands to probable murder, the refugees stayed in a Spanish hotel overnight. In his room, believing he had no hope of survival, Benjamin overdosed on morphine tablets. The authorities’ shock at his suicide is considered one of the reasons the refugees were allowed passage the following day. But the suitcase full of writings he had with him was lost to history, unreproduced.
Benjamin’s death at the hands of the Nazis was a great tragedy, as was the loss of his future work. The following chapter will stay with the Nazis and look at the way they used images to affect the imagination and politics of their citizens. Benjamin was right: the mechanical reproduction of images did lead to the increasingly widespread use of images for political ends (think about every campaign video, billboard, or leaflet you’ve seen around an election). And he worked this out by watching the Nazis who, even then, knew how to make a powerful political image better than almost anyone, to terrible effect. The next section will explore the creation and reproduction of political images; but first, some comprehension questions on Benjamin’s essay.
Works Cited and Further Reading
W.J.T. Mitchell. “Cloning Terror”. What Do Pictures Want? University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Belknap of Harvard U, 2008. 19-42. Print.
Chaplin, Charles, dir. Modern Times. Perf. Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. United Artists, 1936. Film.
Chaplin, Charles, dir. The Great Dictator. Charles Chaplin Film Corporation, 1940. Film
Cornelius Eady, Charlie Chaplin Impersonates a Poet
Cornelius Eady. “Charlie Chaplin Impersonates a Poet.” Autobiography of a Jukebox. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997.
da Vinci, Leonardo. Mona Lisa. 1503, Louvre Museum, Paris.
Osborne, Richard, and Natalie Turner. “Walter Benjamin.” Art Theory for Beginners, For Beginners, 2009.
Olopade, Dayo. “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.” The New Republic, 20 Apr. 2008.
Richter, Gerhard. September. 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Aliza Shvarts. Untitled [Senior Thesis], 2008.