Somewhere, perhaps, a battered black attaché case still exists. In it, almost certainly, there were (and maybe still are) notes and possibly a typed manuscript. It was the property of a 48-year-old German-Jewish philosopher-critic, Walter Benjamin, a kind of visionary genius who drew on many disciplines and wrote essays on topics as varied as the nature of history, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and the ways that the new technologies of photography and film were transforming the way people experienced art. Many people would love that case to be found.
Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892; just over 48 years later, he died alone in a small pine copse at Portbou on the Spanish side of the French-Spanish border. Disillusioned, depressed, and exhausted, after learning that he would be deported by the Spanish authorities back to France and into the hands of the Nazis, he saw no way out.
He had been part of a group of refugees who had struggled across the Pyrenees together. Benjamin was in poor health and had needed to rest one minute for every 10 minutes of walking. He had carried the attaché case across the mountains with him. His arduous flight from Paris had been for this. In his pocket he had 15 morphine tablets (enough to kill a horse, he had joked to his friend, Arthur Koestler). Now he chose to use them on himself. What happened to the case with his prized manuscripts is still a mystery.
Benjamin was a remarkable thinker, though not always an easy writer to follow. Sometimes he seems to be giving a relatively orthodox Marxist reading, at other times, a quotable line seems to open up an entirely new way of thinking about society. His thoughts about how new technologies impact on society seem more prescient and more profound since the advent of the internet.
One of his most-quoted lines is from his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), which continues to stimulate anyone who thinks about images: “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”
Benjamin argued that the invention of photography had transformed the way people experienced works of art. Traditionally, works of art had a unique existence: they were only to be found in one place, they had a particular history, which included a history of ownership and display, they had in Benjamin’s terms an “aura”, by which he meant a special kind of effect on those who experienced them, the aura of authenticity and uniqueness.
But with photography that changed. Multiple accurate images of the same works were dispersed, and the tie of a work of art to a particular place, a particular individual history became weakened.
The effect, Benjamin suggested, was in some ways a diminishment of the almost magical power of particular unique works of art, and at the same time a liberation. As John Berger, whose radical 1972 television series Ways of Seeing drew heavily on Benjamin’s ideas, put it: “For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free.”
Almost everyone who cites Benjamin on the withering of the aura of original artworks agrees with him. But perhaps there is another side to this. The multiplicity of images of artworks in some cases has inspired large-scale pilgrimages to see the original works themselves. There is still something special and compelling about the authentic works.
Museums are thriving in the age of mechanical reproduction (and not because their shops are filled with photographic reproductions of the objects within them). In Athens, the architectural wonders of the Acropolis still attract more than 17,000 visitors a day, presumably in part because of the ubiquity of images online. The site is so popular that Athenian authorities have had to introduce new methods of crowd control.
The Oxford-based Institute for Digital Archaeology has used robot-operated machines and sophisticated scanning to make indistinguishable marble copies of some of the looted Parthenon friezes that currently reside in the British Museum. But who thinks the Greeks will be content to be handed the copies rather than the originals?
The originals still preserve their aura; they are still the marbles carved by Phidias and his assistants, and removed from their original location by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century. Perhaps, after all, their aura has grown rather than diminished in the age of digital reproduction.
