Started "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin

 If I'm honest, I didn't realise it was an essay, so I am already fairly well into it ;) Been on my 'to read' list for a while, but when Jonathan mentioned it, I thought I'd bump it up! VERY dense prose, but some interesting ideas already:

"Even if the circumstances into which the product of technological reproduction of the work of art may be introduced in no way impair the continued existence of the work otherwise, its here and now will in any case be devalued. And if that by no means applies to the work of art alone but also, mutatis mutandis , to a landscape (for instance) that in a film slides past the viewer, as a result of that process a supremely sensitive core in the art object is affected that no natural object possesses in the same degree of vulnerability. That is its genuineness."

How to think about that for digital art? How to value something that only exists as pixel values and can be perfectly copied more-or-less infinitely? Is there really any 'original' in digital art? Is the copy on my hard-drive the 'original'? Or is the copy on Instagram's servers? I would argue there is no original, just copies.

The value of the original according to Benjamin lies in it's history, but the copy on the hard-drive hasn't been 'touched' by me any more than the copy on Instagram's servers. I could sign it as an NFT, and create a chain of custody, but does that really change the nature of the copy? Does that one copy become special? The reason I think NFTs are a con is because I don't think it does - the fact that you own the NFT only matters to other NFT enthusiasts, in my view at least.

I could make a bunch of prints, and say that they are the originals... But already the plural is troubling, although not insurmountable, and I could sign them, but again, are they special? Maybe? The fact that the copies on Insta are too low-res to print is interesting... Do I need to destroy the original files to keep them special? Do I have to promise not to print more? Artificial scarcity seems wrong too, and reminds me too much of the wealthy collectors who would buy hundreds of copies of valuable plates only to deliberately destroy all but a couple :(