But is it art? Walter Benjamin’s aura through the ages — from the Ship of Theseus to NFTs.

In the Marvel television show Wandavision, the android Vision bamboozles a white replica of himself by telling him about a thought experiment from ancient Greece known as The Ship of Theseus.

The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy and is thought to have been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato up to two and a half millennia ago. It was first introduced, however, by Plutarch:

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

It was the same thing for White Vision — he was made out of the exact same parts as Vision, but which one was the original? Unable to wrap his robot brain around it any better than a human could, he flies away in befuddlement.

Another example of the Ship of Theseus in popular culture, and this one might be a bit more familiar if you’re from the UK and over a certain age, was in the classic sitcom Only Fools and Horses. Trigger, the not-too-bright street sweeper regales the main characters Rodney and Delboy with the tale of how he’s used the same broom for over twenty years. Suspicious that this seems unlikely, and fully aware of his ineptitude, they ask him to explain his claim. He goes on to explain that it was indeed true, but in that time the broom had of course had 17 new heads and 14 new handles, much to Rodney and Del’s bemusement.

Moving away from popular culture though, we can see examples of this conundrum at play in the real world.

One is the example of ancient buildings of historic importance. As time passes, these begin to decay which begs the question — should we allow them to slowly waste away, or should we repair them? Which one would be a closer approximation to the authentic nature of the building? There is no clear answer to this, and indeed, there are examples of both approaches in different parts of the world. In Europe, although care is taken to slow the decay down, ancient buildings are often left as ruins, as it is believed to show more accurately how they originally were. However, In Japan, it is often seen as preferable to continually repair and restore old buildings, in the belief that this is more authentic, so long as the correct materials, designs, and positioning are used. This may partly be explained by the fact that in Japan, buildings were more likely to be made from wood rather than from stone like they are in Europe. As a result, they were more likely to completely deteriorate into nothing, meaning intervention was more necessary. Nonetheless, the difference in approaches is an interesting contrast.

We can see something similar occurring in the world of art. It is in the field of art restoration where this lies. As many works of art, especially paintings, are very old, they eventually begin to waste away, much like buildings do. Being that they are made of the kind of materials that can completely waste away into completely nothing, or to the point that they are completely unrecognizable, it has become the norm to restore art when necessary. Compared to buildings though, the authenticity of art is considered a far more important property of their being. The philosopher Walter Benjamin claimed this authenticity, or uniqueness, along with its physical and cultural locale, together create its aura — what he saw as an integral quality for something to be considered art. The act of restoration for him does not interfere with this. Even restored, the piece of art will still be one of a kind, and will still exist physically and in a recognizable state for the culture in which it is important. For him, the Ship of Theseus is still the Ship of Theseus, even once repaired.

There was something that Walter Benjamin considered to not achieve aura, however. Although restoration was fine replication was not. In fact, it was in light of the technological development of mechanical reproduction techniques that he first expounded his thoughts upon this subject. A replicated artwork devalues its aura, as unlike the original art upon which it is based, it is not authentically unique. And, as it is necessarily separate from the original it cannot occupy the same locale as the original — it is not in the same space physically or culturally. The world at large agrees with Walter Benjamin on this. It is for this very reason that the Mona Lisa is priceless, while a print of it from the gift shop can be bought for next to nothing.

Of course, however, artists being artists have looked to experiment with disrupting and transgressing this idea of what defines art according to Benjamin.

This first took place in the era of modern art. Modern art is generally defined by its tendency to throw away traditions of the past in the name of experimentation. The sub-genre of modern art most associated with subverting Benjamin’s concept of aura was pop art (which was built on the foundation of dadaism — but let’s not delve too far into a complete history of art here). Pop artists liked to play on the idea that literally anything can be art — especially the products of mass capitalist consumer society. The thing about these products though is that they’re mass-produced and as such are by definition unable to hold the uniqueness or authenticity that Walter Benjamin, not to mention the entire art world up to that point, believed was necessary for something to be considered art.

Let’s look at an example of this from Andy Warhol, who was arguably the most famous of the pop artists. Taking the example of Campbell’s soup can labels as an example of something mass-produced that he thought could be regarded as art, but the rest of the establishment didn’t, he set out to make a point. He did this by screen printing exact copies of the tins. Thirty-two of them to be exact — one for each flavour variety that was available at the time. He then exhibited them in a gallery. If they weren’t considered art before, maybe they would be after he’d done so. To begin with, the critics were not impressed. Eventually though, realising the point he had made with the work, it was recognised as a twentieth-century masterpiece, and subsequently sold for a large sum of money. However, by doing so, they ironically disproved his point. They weren’t recognising that Campbell’s soups were art, just his paintings of them. Thus they became unique and thereby conform once again to Benjamin’s aura.

This conundrum that Warhol and the pop artists revealed had its effect though, and ever since it has made art hard to capture and attach value to.

Let’s turn now to another more recent artist whose work disrupted the notion of Benjamin’s aura, this time from the world of graffiti art — Banksy.

As I’m sure by now that many of you are aware, Banksy is an anonymous graffiti artist from Bristol in the UK, who creates stencil-based graffiti art in the way it was originally intended — on the mostly exterior walls of both private and public property, preferably where it will be seen by as many people as possible. Due to the satirical political statements that his pieces have made over the years, his work has come to the attention of the art world at large. Like all contemporary spray paint graffiti art since it first emerged in New York in the 1970s, Banksy’s work was originally seen to go against Benjamin’s two properties of art. Firstly, the anonymous nature of it means that it is hard to verify its authenticity — it’s impossible to know if it’s really been created by who it appears to be. And secondly, its locale creates a complicated situation. By appearing on buildings or trains or similar objects, it means its physical presence is inherently unstable — it might not be there forever, it’s technically owned by the owner of the property on which it has appeared who may want or need to wash it off and therefore destroy it. Even if it is left to remain, it can’t be hung in a gallery, it’s subject to the elements, it can easily be painted over by other graffiti artists. The reaction of the public to the work of Banksy however has changed all that. Unlike many graffiti artists, he made his name selling prints, and after this, demand for his work and the prices people were willing to pay for them skyrocketed. But the groundbreaking moment was when one of his spray-painted pieces on a wall was removed and sold at auction. The mural entitled Slave Labour finally met Benjamin’s definition of art and achieved aura. It was recognised as unique, and its locale had become culturally accepted. Spray can graffiti art had become legitimate art.

This brings us to the most recent type of art that has achieved aura — digital art.

Unlike physical art, digital art has always been perfectly replicable. Each copy is completely indistinguishable from any other. This always made Benjamin’s requirement of authenticity a problem for digital art — there was no way for a piece of digital art to be unique or have an original.

Until recently. The invention of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has now made this possible.

For those of you not yet aware, this technology effectively gives something, even digital objects, a unique tag, that is impossible to counterfeit, using the same blockchain technology that makes cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin possible. Despite this, the general public seems to be struggling with accepting digital art as authentic. This is probably due to the way digital piracy has captured our imagination over the last twenty years, and the fact that blockchain technology is new enough to not be fully understood yet. Digital replication is so good that they struggle to grasp that it’s possible to distinguish one digital copy from another. But rest assured it is — in the same way that a counterfeit painting can be distinguished from a real one by someone who knows what they are doing, so too can an NFTed piece of digital art be from a copy by some who knows what they are doing. If anything, by using an NFT, the authenticity of digital art is more robust — the NFT itself is impossible to counterfeit and will never degrade and need to be restored, unlike physical art.

But what about locale, that other requirement to achieve aura according to Benjamin? Can digital art achieve this? Even those that can accept that it can now be authentic can struggle to accept this. As digital art can’t be hung on a wall, or in a gallery, they see it as not really art — they question whether it can truly have locale. Benjamin understood that physical location could be important for the locale, however, he thought that this was cultural, and was by no means necessary. It is likely that the public will eventually come around to this idea — most people nowadays envision their social media accounts or their email inboxes as existing somewhere, as something that occupies space, even if that space is digital and intangible, so there’s no reason why digital art can’t exist in the same manner, once consensus is achieved amongst the masses.

What does this mean for art as a whole? Essentially nothing. NFTs have expanded art further into yet another space, like modern art and graffiti art before it, but fundamentally nothing has changed.

You’d be wrong to reject NFTed digital art as worthless or somehow invalid — it satisfies the same conditions as any other more established form of art or artistic medium.

But on the other side of the coin, you’d be wrong to assume that it is anyway fundamentally more monumental than art that has gone before it. Huge sums of money have famously been exchanged for pieces of NFTed art over the last year but it is growing increasingly apparent that this is being done purely speculatively, and based on very little knowledge of the history of how art achieves value. Before you consider buying NFTed art as an investment, perhaps you should ask yourself first if you’d pay the same amount of money for the exact same thing in a physical form. If the answer is no, then why do you think that the NFTed artwork is any different? As we can see, the medium is just arbitrary — art is art, and its worth isn’t fundamentally affected by whether it’s on a canvas, a brick wall, or in digital space — it’ll only be valuable for as long as people continue to desire it.