Walter Benjamin wrote an article called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in which he writes about what is happening to art due to machines. At the time that Benjamin wrote the article, 1931, there was no such thing as photo shop, laptop computers, digital cameras, or digital camcorders.

In this day in age anyone can create digital things with a common household computer. When looked up in a dictionary, art is defined as -"The quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance". The definition states that the digital media that everyone can create can be considered art. I feel differently.

When someone paints a picture or creates a sculpture, the object and everything that it represents is in a whole, "art". When that picture is copied and reproduced from a machine or that sculpture is replicated it loses some of it's artistic appeal. The original objects themselves are "art", because someone created them with their bare hands from their own feelings and emotions. When it is reproduced it loses that, it loses it's aura. The painting or sculpture now embodies the beauty of piece, but loses the human aspect. The aspect that the piece of art was painstakingly created by someone. So the piece itself isn't art anymore, a painting is just a piece of paper, a sculpture is just a chunk of rock; the things and emotions and feelings that the piece of art represents has now become the "art".

It seems that in today's high tech world there are no "original paintings" so to speak. It jumps directly to the reproduction. When a song is recorded onto a computer it has no raw feeling to it. It can be copied countless times without any effort what so ever. So in this digital world art is what the music or video or whatever it may be embodies. The emotions that it is trying to convey to it's audience and the feelings that the maker had when making it. This is why digital things don't have an aura, or at least not nearly as much of one. They don't have the feeling of extraordinary human ability to create such beautiful pieces of art. I'm not saying that they don't have some sense of aura, but not as much as if you were to go to Paris and see the Venus de Milo. You get the sense of emotion and the human aspect of it, the aura.

And with all the technology of today there is question whether some things are art or not. A digital image itself, the bytes saved on a computer or memory card, is not art. If the image was of a lake at sunset; the picture printed out is not art, but the sun and the lake and the trees and the animals and everything together at that very moment is the art. The film or the space on the memory card is just the vessel to hold the art. A photo shopped is not an authentic image. It could be authentic because it is original to some extent. It's the only image of it's kind, but without an entirely separate image it wouldn't even exist. As defined on dictionary.com something authentic is -"not false or copied; genuine; real". The image is copied and not genuine. In terms of many years ago, photo shopping would be as if Vincent Van Gogh were to take the Mona Lisa and alter things slightly and claim it to be a new piece of art. Photo shopping is not an authentic image. Although it is not authentic it may be seen as art to the creator or to other people that see it as having a more than ordinary significance.