Walter Benjamin's concept of aura and the cultural industry

Abstract

This is an analysis of the text The Work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility, written in 1935 by Walter Benjamin, in which the author examines the changes made by the new techniques of art production in the cultural sphere and develops, as the main argument, the thesis that technical reproducibility causes the overcoming of aura by a work of art. Based on the contrast between Benjamin's text and The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception, written in 1947 by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and the observation of cinema, music and book production (arts that are necessarily reproducible), this article (a) analyzes the thesis of the overcoming of the concept of aura by the work of art in the era of technical reproducibility, (b) contrasts this thesis with Adorno and Horkheimer's reflection on the cultural industry and with the characteristics of the work of art produced during the 20th and 21st centuries, and (c) presents the contributions that arise from this analysis to the reflection regarding the impact of Internet and digital technology over contemporaneous cultural production. As the main conclusion, the article considers that the techniques analyzed by Benjamin, despite having made the work of art independent of a single substratum, did not emancipate it from its auratic character. The key elements of the aura (authenticity and uniqueness) were not overcome, but were instead adapted to the technical changes. Such adaptation occurred around the industrialization that marked cultural production during the 20th century.