July 2024 brought us inescapable examples of the renewed power of pictures. Images of Trump rising up, fist raised, on the 13th after being shot generated to something like religious adoration, even in some cases among the sort of people otherwise quite immune from the cult of Trump’s personality. And images of drag queens re-enacting Leonardo’s Last Supper from the Olympics opening ceremony on the 26th appeared everywhere for days, widely condemned as tasteless, but also as blasphemous. (There seems to be some controversy about whether the echoes of the Last Supper were intentional; I think so.) It is likely be that most readers recall these images vividly enough that this article does not need to be illustrated, even if it has been.

This return of the icon (religious rather than clickable), this renewed outbreak of idolatry and iconoclasm, ought to seem surprising to many intellectuals, particularly those who’ve taken on board Walter Benjamin’s very influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Benjamin argued in that famous 1935 essay that the ability to mechanically reproduce images at will, growing ever more intense from the Renaissance print to the twentieth-century photograph and film, had changed how we perceived the world. As pictures multiplied and became ever more common and cheaper to produce, they lost their magic, their religious or political power. And we, their viewers, lost our sense of the picture or statue as an icon in mystical or intimate union with the savior or king it depicted. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element,” wrote Benjamin, “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”  Reproduced dozens or thousands of times, “the quality of its presence is always depreciated,” he says. The image loses “its uniqueness, that is, its aura.”

The process that Benjamin described at a relatively early phase has now issued into instant infinite multiplicity. Almost anyone can reproduce almost any image effortlessly by pointing and clicking, and pictures such as the Rise of Bloody Trump and the Drag Last Supper circulate in uncountable iterations and alterations, all and none of which are authentic or original.

So we might have expected that the cheapening and weakening of the image that Benjamin described would have continued and intensified in the digital era, that images would have become ever more debased and valueless: almost meaningless, open to be turned in any direction at will, no longer experienced as conveying any sort of truth. But this does not seem to be what has happened. The way people have responded to these particular pictures suggests that in some ways images have been re-mystified or have regained their aura (their power in our collective consciousness).

“Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself,” Benjamin observed in a key passage. “Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.” But the images of 2024 meet the beholder more than halfway; they are dinging in your pocket, merging with your hand; six inches from your eyes, almost beamed directly into your head or maybe your VR goggles.

I imagine that I saw those images literally a thousand times each in a few days on X, but then again on television, news articles, video podcasts. An era in which pictures gain this sort of instantaneous, seemingly laborless omnipresence is not much like the era when they were reproduced in a definite number by being stamped mechanically onto paper. The image, said Benjamin then, had ceased being a religious icon and become a commodity. But now a picture is not sufficiently material and finite to be commodified, in exactly the way Benjamin meant. It’s not exactly getting bought and sold. It just appears, over and over, seemingly everywhere.

Perhaps there’s a new sort of aura or something more or different than aura emerging now. The image ceases to be spatially located. It seems to come unmoored from particularity. For example, it cannot be destroyed, and so participates in the eternal. Pulling all the copies of the Drag Last Supper back is not possible. If I printed a lithograph or a photograph in an edition or 200 or 2 million, I could in principle count and locate, or for that matter burn, the copies. Here, trying to gather up the copies would be a conceptual gaffe: images circulating in repetition on the internet cannot be counted or located, and they cannot be burned. There is no answer to the question of how many reproductions of that image there are, and no one of its appearances has the status of an original.  

That, really, is a mysterious or perhaps mystical ontological status: appearing in material reality in many places at once, but not itself material. The image is not a thing, we might say; rather, a “spirit” or a “meaning” open to indefinitely many uses, taking different forms as the days go by, alterable at will yet always hovering just out of reach as an abstract or non-physical reality driving concrete events or changing people’s consciousness. It represents a new phase of production. A kind of spiritual production, destined to inhabit our collective consciousness

“Authenticity is not reproducible,” argues Benjamin, but now perhaps sheer repetition has replaced authenticity, or rather, renegotiated its terms: what makes an image authentic – significant, important, powerful – is not anything about its origin or how it was produced. Its power is in its mass reception, its ubiquity: the sheer fact that it’s in everybody’s purse and pocket right now. There’s no denying that something like that is merely virtual, merely representational, just a picture. In a case like the Drag Last Supper, it is intensely conscious of its own status as an image. But there’s also no denying that it’s real. And it’s powerful. Don’t believe it? Well, it doesn’t matter. You see it. And then you see it again. And then you see it again.

“The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed,” writes Benjamin. “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” He thought that the direction that the aesthetics of politics was heading in 1935 was fascism and war. And he died five years later fleeing the Nazis. The Nazis did indeed deploy political aesthetics in exceptionally powerful ways.

But now this sort of image is not “based on” politics, but constitutes politics, is itself the (virtual) body politic, seen again in the centrality of the “meme” to the Kamala Harris campaign and seemingly to everything else. The new power of pictures seems to represent the icon’s dematerialization and expansion unto infinity, its respiritualization and diffusion into every aspect of our experience.

The image, in short, has been freed and activated; it has evaporated from the material world and become one with the consciousness of its viewer (and our collective consciousness). As to the political or cultural results of these developments: one imagines that they will be profound, but they cannot be plausibly predicted.

Crispin Sartwell, a retired philosophy professor, is the author, among other books, of Political Aesthetics (Cornell, 2010).