The aura of the original: Walter Benjamin in the age of digital and AI
This article draws on my master's thesis: Verdier, D. (2024). How to serve the democratization of Art among citizens in the digital context of 2024? M.Sc. in Management of Social Innovation, HEC Montréal (supervisor: Rafael Ziegler).
In 1935, Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction strips the unique artwork of its 'aura' — its singular presence in time and place. Nearly a century later, screens and generative AI push that idea to its limit. So what still makes an original painting worth more than its image?
What Benjamin meant by 'aura'
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Benjamin showed that every work is reproducible by nature, but industrialization breaks the authoritative aura of the unique object rooted in tradition. As reproduction grows, the work's cult and exhibition value shift — and, he warned, can hollow out.
Warhol, screens, and now AI
Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup screenprints (1962) dramatized this: mass-production techniques democratize access by cutting time, cost and price — yet, by Benjamin's logic, may lower the ritual value. Generative AI is the newest such tool. On social media, art scrolls past in seconds, almost without exhibition value; an image can even be 'art' with no artwork behind it at all.
Why originals still matter
A hand-painted original carries what a feed cannot: a single moment, an artist's gesture, a physical presence in your space. That is the aura — and it is exactly what you collect when you choose an original work rather than an infinitely copied image. Reproduction multiplies access; the original keeps meaning.
