Experience of the aura arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.
Benjamin, 2003, p. 338
[A] new acquisition often radiates homelessness. Plucked from the blur of international art-making, hauled ino the center of an empty white cube, and subsequently stuck away in storage […] the work can appear to have been brought up short and strangely defeated or sapped, while, conversily the museum space becomes almost indistinguishable from a show-room. Both effects are heightened when the work in question - a show-prop from Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle, for example - is extracted from a larger installation, performance or film, where its significance almost solely resides. The museum is, ideologically, a historical place and the aura it thereby confers on objects of the present or the very recent past is often that of novelty. Novelty is history's way of condescending to the new, and the consequences can be crushing.
Weiss, 2005, p. 46
Ursula Frohne notes that: "[M]ost museums have staunchly held on to the historically based difference between the aesthetic meaning and value of old art genres and new, technologically-produced work." Her observation resonates with Walter Benjamin's argument that a unique original possesses an aura that is lacking in its mechanically produced copy. This contrasts with the Duchampian argument that, since the aura of any artwork falls away after a decade, when the social context within which it was produced has changed, reproduction re-invigorates the artwork. Duchamp was the first artist to assert this in his own work (which also included film), demonstrating at an early stage that editioning and repeated re-presentation is not specific to film and video installation. Duchamp's observation, practically demonstrated by museums and collectors ever since, applies to 'ephemeral' works across the board, including, for example, the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, the fluorescent tube installations of Dan Flavin, and the Conceptual language works of Lawrence Weiner, as well as contemporary ephemeral installations.
Iles and Huldisch, 2005, p. 80 - 81
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