Lance Turner

The image that makes up the images of Walter Benjamin are a scene from Terminator 2 where the Terminator (a machine that can only think objectively/a personification of the idea of the digital camera) sees John Connor crying and says "now I know why you cry". He sees this act of subjectivity in a purely objective mode of interpretation, and can still define why it happens. Similarly, a camera can interpret this idea of the aura, or spiritual energy, and reproduce it. Benjamin says in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that the reproduction of Art destroys it's aura and authenticity, which is to say that it destroys it's spirit. Yet if a person, say Walter Benjamin, were cloned or copied perfectly down to his exact atomic structure, then would the two clones not have their own spirits and their own authenticity? If an Andy Warhol painting was shot up after it was made giving this reproduced object an authenticity, then isn't authenticity based on something's history? And by extension, wouldn't anything be authentic or have an aura? The ideas of the aura and of authenticity are absurd.