Everyone is TAKING PHOTOS, nobody is looking

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Imagine you're in the Louvre and you're standing in front of the Mona Lisa and everyone around you is taking pictures.

[00:00:06]No one is really looking at the painting. Not too hard to imagine. It happens every day. And in 1935, decades before smartphones, one man saw this coming. His name is Walter Benjamin. And his explanation makes so much sense, especially in this day and age. Okay, take the starry night. You've probably seen it a thousand times on t-shirts, on mugs, in photos. But when you stand in front of the actual painting at MoMA, it hits different. Suddenly, you notice the painting is thick and violent. You can see every stroke Van made, the depth, the pressure, the hand behind it.

[00:00:44]Benjamin called this the aura, the unique presence of an original work of art, something that exists in one place at one moment in time and nowhere else.

[00:00:54]Because an artwork has texture, it has scale. It's an object with a history.

[00:00:59]And all this dies in a reproduction. The aura does not survive the copy. It gets flattened into pixels or onto paper. But this does not mean these reproductions are a bad thing. Of course not. I make and use them all the time. It's perfect to learn about art. But it's not the same because to really experience an artwork, you have to put the phone down, take it all in, look at it, and then take your picture.