aura A term used initially by Walter Benjamin (1970b) in the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age

of Mechanical Reproduction' to denote the uniqueness of a work of art and the mystical value
attached to it through its association with tradition and ritual. This quality, Benjamin argued,
was endangered by the processes of mechanical reproduction. He did not see this as having
entirely negative consequences, however, since the newer mass arts of photography and
especially cinema introduced a new radicalizing, collective dimension; an argument connected
in his work with their allegorical rather than symbolic nature.
Theodor Adorno, Benjamin's contemporary, and a leading figure of the School of Social
Research with which Benjamin was associated, shared an interest in technology and art but
disagreed about the potential of the commercial arts of mass reproduction. In a direct reply to
Benjamin's argument, he defended the autonomy of art and was critical of Benjamin's
attribution exclusively of the 'bourgeois' attributes of a magical or spiritual aura to it. This, said
Adorno, ignored the internal, dialectical juxtaposition within autonomous art of both magical
aura and a contrary 'mark of freedom'. (1992: 52).
The aesthetic and cultural status of original works of art remains a matter of debate. In recent
times, certainly, original works of art, especially paintings, have risen enormously in
commercial value (see Bourdieu 1984): thus, in a vulgarization of Benjamin's meaning, their
'aura' has increased, not diminished. At the same time, the expanded processes of technical
reproduction have reinforced Benjamin's point. Fredric Jameson, for example, suggests that
along with 'the ideology of the unique self', the original art work is a thing of the past (Brooker
[ed.] 1992: 168). This loss of uniqueness, an attendant loss of distinction between high and
mass or popular culture and a resulting stylistic ECLECTICISM are taken to be common features
of postmodernism. [from: Brooker, 1999]

"All mysticism, from an attitude against mysticism. This is how the materialist view of history is
adapted! It is quite dreadful. Brecht on Benjamin

We define the aura of [a natural object] as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close
it might be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain
range on the horizon, or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of
those mountains, of that branch.
---Benjamin's Definition

So, for Benjamin, the aura is, in the first place, a quality of our experience of objects, not
necessarily restricted to the products of artistic creation. In the case of the work of art,
however, this exalted quality (what Benjamin calls its "cult-value") is closely tied to the religious
or quasi-religious element in art -- a remnant of that association between art and religion
characteristic of pre-modern society.
However, the "desacralising" processes of modern civilization -- the development of industrial
capitalism and the attendant rise of the masses -- have, hand in hand with the purely technical
fact of the increasing mechanical reproducibility of the art-work itself, diminished human
beings' power to see and respond to this quality. Thus, the uniqueness of the work of art
becomes increasingly questionable, and leads to the decline of its cultic function:

[The contemporary decay of the aura] rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to
the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of
contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as
their bent towards overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction

Returning now to Adorno, it is important to note that his aesthetics has several crucial features
in common with the Idealist theory just described. He believes that authentic art does indeed
have this quality of "pointing beyond itself", and he agrees, too, that this is a form of
manifestation of Geist(or Spirit):
That by which works of art, as they become appearance, are more than what they are: that is
their Spirit. (AT 86, AGS 7 134)xi
What is more (although readers of Adorno have sometimes failed to appreciate the fact)
Adorno shares Hegel's criticism of the limitation, which its sensible form imposes on art; it
requires a higher, theoretical form to elucidate its truth-content:
[The truth-content of works of art] can only be attained by philosophical reflection. (AT 128, AGS
7 193)
Hence, the work of art's character as Schein, according to Adorno, is, at once, both true and
false; it creates the illusion that the aesthetic quality of the work of art is a property without
relation to non-aesthetic reality, but, at the same time (paradoxical though it may seem) it is
what connects the work of art to a broader sphere of social meaning: