The aura of the original and serial reproduction: The cases of painting, photography and the digital

This chapter will address the matter of the original and of reproduction in relation to their systems of value. Firstly, I will refer to Walter Benjamin’s theory concerning the aura of a painting and will define it as the crossing of two presences, that of the painting as an object and that of the observer at a specific significant, epiphanic moment. Secondly, I will address the matter of reproduction as it relates to photography and to the production of multiple prints through the perspective put forth by Benjamin, but also and foremost through that of Nelson Goodman who distinguishes between autography and allography. Thirdly, I will examine the digital universe of images, which has completely changed the economy of values as it gives rise to operations of endless manipulation and modification. In our current era, digital technology not only facilitates reproduction, but also enables the production of new and reproducible objects, as well as the falsification of the human (think of deepfakes) and the generation of images from other images or from texts (Generative AI). To study all these different systems of value, that is, of the original and unique object, of the rare, and of the serially reproduced and manipulated, I will refer to the concept of economy, which comes from Aristotle and which has been reformulated by M.J. Mondzain and by J.-F. Bordron of the Paris School of Semiotics.