How Social Media Is Rewriting the Aura of Art
- mariacharame
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
~Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)
When Walter Benjamin wrote these lines in 1936, he could not have imagined the infinite scroll. His concern then was the camera, the way it replicated an artwork and, through reproduction, stripped it of what he called its aura: the artwork’s singular “here and now,” its unrepeatable presence and authenticity. Nearly a century later, we are no longer speaking about the photograph but about the algorithm. Not about reproduction, but about circulation, an endless, frictionless stream of images in which every artwork becomes both omnipresent and nowhere at all.
This article explores how social media has rewritten Benjamin’s aura, transforming the act of viewing art from an encounter into a gesture, from contemplation into consumption.
I. The Aura and Its Disappearance
Benjamin’s concept of the aura refers to the unique presence of an artwork in its original context. A painting by Caravaggio in a dimly lit chapel has an aura; a postcard of the same painting does not. The aura is tied to ritual, distance, and authenticity, what Benjamin called “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”
With the rise of photography and cinema, Benjamin argued, art lost this sacred distance. Reproduction made the image democratic, but also detached it from its ritual roots. It was no longer something we approached with reverence, but something that came to us in books, posters, and magazines. What he saw as the “decay of aura” was not only an aesthetic shift but a cultural one: art became accessible, but also disposable.
II. The Infinite Reproduction: Instagram and the Death of Distance
If mechanical reproduction diminished the aura, then digital reproduction has annihilated it. Instagram is not simply a gallery, it is a machine of circulation. Every artwork, whether it hangs in the Louvre or a studio apartment, exists simultaneously in thousands of glowing rectangles around the world. It can be saved, reposted, cropped, filtered, and memed.
The ritual of the museum, the hushed awe before the object has been replaced by a new digital liturgy: the double-tap. The question is no longer what does this work mean? But how does it perform online?
As art historian David Joselit observes in After Art (2012), the contemporary artwork “gains its value through circulation.” Its visibility within networks, not its physical presence, defines its cultural weight. In this economy, virality becomes aura, a paradoxical kind of authenticity born not from uniqueness but from ubiquity.
III. The Museum as Backdrop: When Aura Becomes Aesthetic
Museums themselves have adapted to this new visual logic. Take the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Rooms, for example, immersive installations designed for total sensory immersion. Yet what often defines the visitor’s experience is not the artwork itself, but the photo taken inside it. The reflective surfaces of Kusama’s mirrored rooms become Instagram’s own architecture: a place where the visitor performs the role of witness, subject, and curator simultaneously.
The “Instagrammable museum” from the Museum of Ice Cream to teamLab Borderless has turned the act of documentation into the very purpose of the exhibition. What once required pilgrimage (a journey to encounter the sacred art object) now requires performance (a pose to prove the encounter happened).
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital” takes on a new dimension here: the aura of the artwork is transferred to the individual through the act of online display. In other words, we no longer go to the museum to see, but to be seen seeing.
IV. The Aura Reborn: Digital Artists and the Post-Photographic Gaze
Yet Benjamin’s prophecy is not entirely fulfilled. If the traditional aura has decayed, perhaps a new kind of digital aura has emerged.
Contemporary digital artists from Refik Anadol’s data sculptures to Sasha Stiles’ AI poetry explore a different sense of presence. Their works are born digital, existing natively in the network rather than being degraded by it. When we watch Anadol’s fluid, data-driven visuals projected across the façade of the Museum of Modern Art, the experience is collective, immersive, and almost spiritual. The aura here is not tied to an original object but to an event, a shared moment of digital transcendence.
Similarly, artists like Hito Steyerl have turned Benjamin’s concerns into critical tools. In works like How Not to Be Seen (2013), Steyerl exposes the absurdity of visibility itself in the digital era. “Resolution,” she suggests, has become our new ritual, a way to measure existence. To appear online is to be.
Thus, the aura mutates: from the object’s uniqueness to the subject’s visibility. We have replaced the sacred presence of art with the sacred presence of ourselves.
V. The Algorithm as Curator
In the age of social media, the curator is no longer a person but a program. The algorithm decides what art we see, how long we see it, and what follows it. Its choices are opaque but powerful, privileging what is visually loud, emotionally instant, or contextually flat.
Art historian Claire Bishop notes in Radical Museology (2013) that museums once sought to frame art through historical or thematic context. The algorithm, by contrast, frames nothing it flattens. A Renaissance painting, a meme, and a fashion ad can all appear within the same scroll, equalized by format and speed. This “flattening of attention” erases hierarchy and context, a democratization that is both exhilarating and destructive.
The aura, in Benjamin’s sense, depended on duration on lingering before the artwork. But on Instagram, duration is penalized. The platform rewards speed, not contemplation. The result is what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the “burnout society”: a culture of hyper-visibility and shallow presence, where attention itself becomes a consumable resource.
VI. Screens as Shrines
And yet people still go to museums. They still queue to stand before The Mona Lisa, phones raised like votive offerings. Perhaps this is the paradox of our time: the more we digitize art, the more we crave its physicality.
When visitors flood into immersive exhibitions or pilgrimage to see a Banksy mural before it’s vandalized, they are seeking something Benjamin would recognize presence. The moment of being there, even if only to photograph it. The screen has not destroyed the shrine; it has redefined it.
Our phones have become portable altars, surfaces of ritualized looking. Each image we save, repost, or edit is a small act of devotion to the aesthetic self.
VII. Beyond Nostalgia: Toward a New Theory of Aura
It would be tempting to read this as a decline, as the final death of art’s authenticity. But that nostalgia belongs to a pre-digital world. The aura was never only about the artwork, it was about our relation to it. And that relation, while transformed, is not gone.
Today’s aura might be participatory rather than contemplative, dynamic rather than static. The collective experience of a digital artwork thousands watching a live performance online, reacting in real time, produces a new form of presence. Philosopher Boris Groys argues in Art Power (2008) that in the digital age, “the aura is not destroyed but mass-produced.” Each viewer becomes a reproducer of the aura through their act of sharing. The aura has migrated from the object to the network.
VIII. Conclusion: After the Scroll
When Benjamin mourned the loss of aura, he also mourned the loss of a kind of slowness, a mode of seeing that required humility before the work of art. Social media has not only transformed art; it has transformed the viewer. We no longer approach images as witnesses, but as participants, editors, and performers.
And yet, within this collapse of distance, a strange new spirituality emerges. The same platforms that trivialize art also grant it new forms of life dynamic, collective, and alive in ways Benjamin could never have imagined.
Perhaps the aura was never meant to disappear. Perhaps it only changed from the sacred silence of the gallery to the glowing pulse of the feed.
References
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936.
Joselit, David. After Art. Princeton University Press, 2012.
Bishop, Claire. Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? Koenig Books, 2013.
Groys, Boris. Art Power. MIT Press, 2008.
Steyerl, Hito. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File. 2013.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press, 1984.
Photo sources
Walter Benjamin: httpsceasefiremagazine.co.ukwalter-benjamin-art-aura-authenticity
Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Dots Mirrored Room: Matress Factory infinitydotssquare-768x768
TeamLab Forest of Resonating Lights Maison et Objet Installation - Paris © designboom
Source Tate Artwork Caption How Not to Be Seen_ A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File 2013, Hito Steyerl
About 20000 people a day visit the Louvre in Paris to see the Mona Photo by Grzegorz Czapski Alamy sourcetheguardian