Perhaps the most famous artist of all time is Leonardo da Vinci. The work of this enigmatic and legendary Renaissance painter still reverberates through our world today, in art, culture, science, and engineering. In 2017, his masterpiece Salvator Mundi sold at auction for $450 million. There seems little doubt that the value of his work is rooted in the influence he continues to wield, five hundred years after his death.

What makes some oiled pigment on some old wood worth this mind-boggling amount of money? Imagine for a moment that you’re face to face with Salvator Mundi. You observe its brushstrokes, its colors, and you shiver because you know its history, its story. You’re here – so close to it in the flesh. Now imagine the museum docent tells you that the painting you’re looking at is in fact a replica, because the original is too valuable to be put on public display. Do you feel different? What if now you learn that, through some miraculous material science, the replica is atom-for-atom identical to the original, so similar that even experts armed with chemical testing methods cannot tell which is which? Do you still feel innately that there is an “original” and a “copy”? 

Previously in this series, we saw that images derive their power from social processes rather than any inherent quality. A question naturally follows: why do some images become more valuable than others?

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), Walter Benjamin argued that modern (to the early 20th century) technologies used in art – photography, film – facilitated reproduction and therefore stripped works of their aura:

 the unique presence grounded in tradition, labor, and material singularity. In his view, to have value, a work of art has to be done manually by a person with a certain amount of uniqueness, human labor, and time value attached, and if it has persisted through time, its aura grows. A photograph, on the other hand, can be printed many times over with similar results; a motion picture, unlike a live theatrical production, could be screened across cinemas the world over. The effect, he claimed, democratizes images but also dilutes their authority and authenticity.

Is this how we value art? Consider the prevalence of Vincent van Gogh, who only sold one painting during his lifetime, or Johannes Vermeer, whose work went largely unrecognized for a full two centuries following his death. The recognition for their work today, as compared to the pittance received during their lives, is not because their work has somehow gained aura in the sense that it accumulated any more labor or uniqueness in the intervening years; their fame arose because others have found worthy qualities in their works and took the trouble to proclaim it to the world, so that more people could bear witness and attest to those worthy qualities.

Further, with the hindsight of a hundred years of filmmaking, we’d be hard pressed to argue today that film as a medium involves less labor or doesn’t compel at least as much myth, reverence, and collective identification on a global scale as its predecessor art forms. In fact, as a format dedicated to the creation of make-belief, its role in human storytelling arguably surpasses every medium that has come before it. It holds immense cultural value, even if it does not possess the kind of aura posited by Benjamin.

A reframing of aura as a value marker, then, lies not in permanence, but in attention. We could say that the Mona Lisa is “auratic” – or possesses aura – not because it cannot be reproduced, but because millions of human acts of attention have accrued around it over time, and continue to do so. In this way, perhaps an atom-for-atom replica might be differentiated from the original, until the replica becomes as exhibited, therefore as “venerated” as the original. Value, in other words, is assigned and maintained, not inherent.

Instead of aura as a property of objects, we might think of it as a condensation of human attention bestowed on an artifact: repeated gazes, stories, pilgrimages, reproductions, citations, memes. In this view, what erodes value is not reproducibility but indifference. An image loses force not because it can be copied, but because people stop caring.

This shift – from permanence to momentary attention – is where contemporary image culture lives. The most reproduced image is not the most worthy unless it continues to command attention. Alas, in this attention economy, momentary thrills detach us from the immutability of history. Or perhaps, they free us.