All quotes from http://bid.berkeley.edu/bidclass/readings/benjamin.html
Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations–the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film–have had on art in its traditional form.
An attachment to an idea of originals and forgeries weighs over Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; perhaps it eulogizes the idea of originals. But “the original” is not only an artifact but its context:
The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity…
The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.
The “authentic” artwork is the original artifact in a place and time; in the case of drama, this includes the performance captured. In the age of mechanical reproduction, the authentic object and context are diminished, and through reproduction the artwork detaches itself from its original context.
It seems like we’re so far past even the axioms here. There’s nothing prior to reproduction any more. What aura is “Toy Story” detaching itself from? Where does the original manuscript for this entry live?
… for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.
And so we return and begin again. One might, at first glance, assume that, with something like a persistent world game, we’ve left the territory of ritual altogether: there’s no single artifact or performance to even separate from its aura. All we have is the interaction of dispersed clients across a server. And yet in this space ritual is nearly all there is. The art of a persistent world game consists of countless moments that are too multiple and ephemeral to be reproducible — story-making so invested in the moment and in action that it exists only in real time. Even as we entirely detach art from a physical presence or locus, we restore its irreproducibility.
Here’s another writeup on art in the age of digital reproduction.