Dan Neil is at it again in the Los Angeles Times, One is unique, two is too many. Neil takes a look at the Chevy SSR (Super Sport Roadster). He begins:
The most lucid thing the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin ever wrote is the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1936, during an apparent dry spell in Berlin’s hashish supply.
Benjamin’s famous essay, a staple of film-lit classes, puts a dope-scented finger on a central issue in aesthetics: If the art object is special — if it has an authenticity, an “aura,” Benjamin calls it — what is the status of the duplicate, the mechanically reproduced copy?
“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” says Benjamin. Reproduction “substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”
In other words: The first David by Michelangelo is art, the second is a lawn ornament.