Art and AI—Benjamin’s ‘aura’ as a Locus of Resistance: Notes, Theses and Images

I revisit Benjamin’s text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ and find it both problematic and richly suggestive. Carefully reading it, both with and against, I search it for continuities and breaks with ‘reproducibility’ today and hence insights into AI and its relationship to art. In so doing, I sketch some tentative conclusions about how such an investigation might assist us towards understanding what art is and isn’t, how the practice of art relates to our humanity and finally, though a thorough settling of accounts with AI and its boosters will require political change on a grand scale, how Benjamin’s ‘aura’ might offer a small but significant locus of resistance to the commodification and dehumanising drive currently occasioned by AI in the field of art.