In his most widely known essay, "The Artwork in the Age of Its
Technical Reproducibility," Walter Benjamin attributes to the
traditional artwork an "aura" of residual sacredness, which
derives from its relative withdrawal from everyday life. He goes
on to give an account of this aura's progressive diminishment
due to the influence of technically reproducible media like
photography and film. Before the full-scale introduction of
reproduction technology, Benjamin argues, the aura of artworks
rested on their qualities of uniqueness, authenticity, and
historical endurance. The photographic reproduction of singular
artworks and, more recently, the production of new works to
which reproducibility is inherent begin to erode that aura. In
the twentieth century, the unprecedented extension of
technically reproducible images and the avant-garde's active
challenge to traditional notions of art converge at a decisive
point: they put the notion of art as such in doubt. Both the new
technical means and the new contexts thr