This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s text, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) to explore how technological advancement transformed the socio-political function of art and severed its ties to religious tradition. Benjamin identifies the degradation of art’s ‘aura’ as a casualty of these changes. I review how Benjamin defines aura, as a sensation connected to art’s cult value, before considering the political implications of its decay. I demonstrate how mechanical reproduction fundamentally altered art’s function to enable a fragmentary construction of subjectivity. I then draw on Rosalind Krauss’ essay, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum” (1990), to demonstrate the cultural changes predicted by Benjamin decades earlier. Specifically, how the degradation of ‘aura’ led to a radical restructuring of the museum as a site which produces identity, moving from a temporal to spatial organising principle to accommodate a radically contingent and embodied subject.
EXORDIUM 