Q - Is the "destruction of aura" still a relevant debate in today's online culture?
The popular reception of the “Site Specific” series by Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri [1] has spawned a slew of imitators over the blogosphere in recent months. Photosharing websites such as Flickr now have a pool devoted to his signature tilt-shift technique [2], and links to how-to tutorials for creating quick Barbieri knockoffs with Photoshop are readily found [3]. I was intrigued enough myself to tryout this trick on Toronto, from the relative comfort and safety of my office workstation (my helicopter temporarily grounded until spring).
Some questions tend to crop up, though:
Given the ease with which an artist’s characteristic style or technique can be simulated/reproduced/hacked, what effects (whether negative or positive) to the work's artistic integrity result by its co-option into another medium—here digital manipulation—and its subsequent dissemination across the internet, a place where questions of authorship and intellectual property rights become blurred?
What’s more, how are such circumstances measurable legally, morally, and aesthetically when the celebrity of said artist is obviously ascribable to that medium’s wide distribution and availability in the first place? (Consider that Barbieri’s name is now synonymous with the tilt-shift lens effect despite the fact that contemporaries have been doing similar things: for example, Frank van der Salm, Miklos Gaal, Jorg Fahlenkamp, and Toni Hafkenscheid.)
The problem of the authenticity of the artwork calls to mind Walter Benjamin, who, in his 1930 essay A Small History of Photography, observed:
"Now, to bring things closer to us, or rather to the masses, is just as passionate an inclination in our day as the overcoming of whatever is unique in every situation by means of its reproduction. Every day the need to possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture, or rather a copy, becomes more imperative. …The stripping bare of the object, the destruction of the aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness."
[1] http://www.artnet.com/artist/150613/olivo-barbieri.html
[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/faketiltshift/interesting/
[3] http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/27/fake_tilt_shift_phot.html
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