I love Benjamin's writing, but looking back after the better part of a century, I don't think that his theses hold up well; he would reject as Not Art much of the latter 20th century's output, which is an appealing position for a curmudgeon, but not a very practical one.

I've come to believe that the only useful notions of Art are either the Supreme Court definition ("I know it when I see it") or the wildly all-encompassing ones; "anything arranged or interpreted according to aesthetic principle," is more or less my working definition. Any other definition either ends up rejecting vast swathes of things that clearly are art or setting you up for reductio ad absurdum.

So yeah, I think it's art. Now we can move onto more interesting questions, like "who is the artist?"

Note: anyone interested in this stuff should absolutely read Benjamin!

So what's the "aura" in this case, how do we measure it? Is it something that some humans ("artists") can produce but other humans ("non-artists") can't? Is it something that can only be created by something with mitochondria or which processes information using serotonin?

thanks for this reference, I am surprised that this is the first time I've heard of the book... I had an art history professor in college that was adamant that photography is not art, and I have to agree even though there are beautiful photographs out there.