This is the principle that guides his most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” now canonical text in art history, film studies, and related fields. In it Benjamin argues that traditionally, a painting or sculpture was endowed with something he calls “aura, deriving from a recognition of its absolute uniqueness. That is why thousands of people line up every day for a quick, obscured glimps of the Mona Lisa: not just to see it but to be it its quasi-sacred presence. In the age of technology, Benjamin perceived, this uniqueness is diluted by the ready availability of reproductions, which makes it possible to see a work of art without ever having seen the original. Furthermore, in the twentieth century’s characteristic art forms, photograph and film, there is no such thing as an original.

Surprisingly, Benjamin welcomed the idea of art without aura. He reasoned that aura was a kind of aristocratic mystery, and that its disappearance should herald a new, more democratic art: “The social significance of film, even—and especially—in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage.” This rhetoric, with its enthusiasm for “destruction” and “liquidation,” sounds distinctly odd coming from Benjamin. How, the reader wonders, did the great champion of Proust and Kafka end up decrying uniqueness and originality? How could the man who compared “In Search of Lost Time” to the Sistine Chapel ceiling also believe that “contemplative immersion” in a work of art was “a breeding ground for asocial behavior”?
The answer lies in Benjamin’s exceedingly awkward embrace of Marxism. Like many other intellectuals of the time, he came to feel that only Communism could save Europe from war, depression, and Fascism.