Session Notes

Opening Question

Benjamin says in the afterword that fascism gives the masses expression without fundamentally changing the property and ownership relation between the masses and the people that have. What’s the nature of that aesthetic move? What can be said about aesthetics and politics? And ultimately, what does it mean to politicize art… and what does our understanding of photography have to do with this?

We opened with the epilogue, because that is where the stakes become undeniable. Fascism lurks in the background of both essays. He doesn’t repeatedly bring it up, but it lurks undeniably and boldly as a backdrop throughout, and the final passage of “The Work of Art” drags it squarely into the light. “Fiat ars, pereat mundus” (make art even though the world gets destroyed), followed by the Marinetti-inflected passage on war as aesthetic satisfaction, and then the sentence that the whole conversation turned on: “Humanity, which in Homer’s day provided a spectacle for the gods of Olympus, has now become one for itself. Its alienation from itself has reached a point where it now allows its own destruction to be savored as an aesthetic pleasure of the First Order.” And then, almost quietly, and definitely under-explained: “Communism’s reply is to politicize art.” We sat with that reply for two hours, and even still are not entirely sure we know what it means…

We began by walking through photography’s arc as Benjamin traces it. Early photographers, working with a medium that was slow and resource-intensive and genuinely new, were capturing what he calls the “optical unconscious”: aspects of reality invisible to the naked eye. Those early portraits, of people who barely understood what the camera was, who weren’t posing for the image they were constructing, had something in them (a far cry from the contemporary “selfie”). Then science infiltrated the medium, and photography began “claiming” to extract reality rather than attend to it. The retouched negative arrived (BOOOOOOOO, jk, but not really… or am i??). Art Nouveau tried to tell you what was real through deliberate artifice. The Surrealists recovered something by doing the opposite: Atget photographing empty Parisian streets around 1900 was pointing at an absence, like a crime scene without a suspect, like an image that called you back rather than gave itself to you immediately. “During COVID”, one of us remarked, “I rode a bicycle through an emptied New York and took photographs of famous buildings with nobody in them”. These photos mess with your brain to look at. There is something eerie and alien about a vacant Hudson Yards that photography can capture and yet cannot explain. That pointing-at-absence, we came to feel, is close to what Benjamin means by aura. Which, what in the world is even “Aura”…?

Aura: “a strange web of space and time”. A “unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be”. The terms are deliberately paradoxical, and they need to be. Standing next to a Picasso at the Art Institute, one of us described a heaviness, a transmission of historical moment, that no poster print of the same painting can seem to provide. We talked about encountering a Leonora Carrington sculpture in a garden in Mexico City, full of texture and detail, genuinely strange, genuinely present, and then encountering what appeared to be a replication of the same sculpture later in a Chelsea gallery, cleanly cast from a mold, mounted under lights, obviously not the thing. The Mexico City version demanded something of you. The Chelsea version was available for consumption. Benjamin’s terminology started to take shape for us in a tactile way, rooted in our experience: the contemplating person is absorbed by the work of art; the distracted mass absorbs it. One gets swallowed; the other swallows.

This moved us toward the question we probably could not avoid in 2026: is AI a sort of new version of photography? One among us had used AI tools to make music, putting genuine time and curatorial taste into it, and world-class musicians had allegedly cried when they heard it. Someone else had attended an AI puppet show that was, by their accounting, “pure slop”. A study was described where listeners failed to reliably distinguish AI-generated music from human-made music, and when one listener discovered that the song she had been enjoying and feeling was AI-generated, something in her face fell and she got (understandably) pissed off. We kept circling back to the same thing: Benjamin himself essentially warns us, near the opening of the essay, that the question of whether photography is art (that is to say, some sort of “pure” art) is the wrong question entirely, and that framing the question that way is already a kind of fascistic move, because it makes the category into a gatekeeping instrument, full of hierarchy and legitimacy (determined by…. whom?). Trying to determine scientifically whether a piece of music has aura, whether it was made by a human, whether it counts, is already doing what he is warning against. That line of questioning conflates the aesthetic experience with the scientific one. It kills the thing it is trying to verify. The fact that we fell into this trap for a spell before realizing what we were doing, perhaps betrays that the tendency to do so may be sort of “baked in” to our common experience. Maybe this tendency is something that we have to actively push back against within ourselves.

What photographic literacy requires, we found, is not knowing everything there is to know about a photograph. It is knowing everything there isn’t to know. The aura is the withholding. It is whatever cannot be captioned, cannot be retouched out, cannot be established by the right credentials. A certain sort of genuineness.

The question of forgery came up later in the conversation. “If we have experienced real ‘aura’ in front of something that later turns out to be a fake, does that invalidate the experience?” We were not able to arrive upon a clean answer to this. One of us pointed out that the more troubling version of this problem is already…. well, everywhere. Apparently, someone had recently trolled the internet by posting a genuine Monet and labeling it AI-generated, and the comments flooded in with confident technical critiques of something they were looking at directly and not seeing at all.

The conversation returned in the final stretch to one of our member’s earlier insights that what Benjamin is ultimately doing is drawing an analogy between the reproduced art object and the fascist political object: both are detached from tradition by the technique of reproduction, both are made ahistorical, both circulate as something authentic-seeming that has been stripped of genuine presence. A contrived Aryan ancestry performs the same operation on history that the retouched negative performs on the image and both substitute a plurality of copies for a unique existence. The politicization of art, read this way, would be the opposite move: using politics not as the end to which art is a means (like toward a political end), but as the means by which art is freed to be an end in itself, the condition that allows people to actually create and actually receive.

We admittedly don’t know what that looks like in practice and we aren’t afraid to admit it, but it feels like a win (or at least the beginning of one) even just to interrogate this question. What we did land on together was a genealogy. We did not wake up one day unable to make our own gifts for the people we love, letting Hallmark mediate our sentimentality through someone else’s production at the cost of our own labor. That structure was built over swaths of time. Benjamin is tracing the construction of this structure. The call to action at the end of the essay is a demand to contend with a force that has actually changed our perception, incrementally, to the point where the changed perception feels like just how perception is. I don’t know who needs to hear it, but it’s ok to make something, even poorly, as a gift for someone – it might even just be received with more love and excitement than something manufactured, reproduced, perfect, and spotless.