Genius, Creativity, and Aura: Benjamin’s Legacy in the Digital Era

Modern Times. AI art

Introduction

When Walter Benjamin wrote his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1935, cinema and photography had already unsettled long-standing notions about originality, creativity, and aesthetic authority. His central thesis — that technical reproduction dissolved the “aura” of the artwork — pointed toward a profound transformation in how art was produced and perceived. Today, almost a century later, the rise of artificial intelligence and algorithmic creativity compels us to revisit these very categories. Concepts such as “genius,” “authenticity,” or “eternal value,” once stable in earlier epochs, now appear unstable once more. Like signs in Saussure’s linguistic system, they acquire significance only in relation to one another and within the material conditions that structure art’s existence. This article traces these concepts across three stages: before Benjamin, during the era of mechanical reproduction, and in our current age of algorithmic generation.

Before Benjamin: Permanence and Ritual

In the centuries preceding the technological breakthroughs of photography and cinema, artistic concepts were defined by material stability. Stone, pigment, parchment, or printed paper ensured that works existed as singular, enduring objects. Within this framework, “creativity” was often regarded as a divine spark or transcendental gift. The Romantic tradition exalted the artist as a conduit of higher inspiration. Immanuel Kant (1790/2000) defined genius as “the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art” (p. 186), emphasizing originality as the key to aesthetic value.

Uniqueness and authenticity were bound to the here and now of the object. An altar piece or a Renaissance painting commanded reverence not only for its iconography but also for its unrepeatable presence within ritual contexts. Art’s mystery derived from its distance, its resistance to full appropriation, its aura of transcendence. As Benjamin later observed, such concepts of creativity, eternal value, and mystery belonged to a world where art remained tethered to tradition and cult (Benjamin, 1969).

In this period, the sign system of art revolved around permanence, scarcity, and ritual. Aura was not yet named as such, but it was experienced in the sense of distance and reverence that marked the viewer’s relation to the sacred or the sublime.

Benjamin’s Diagnosis: Mechanical Reproduction

By 1935, the proliferation of photography, film, and phonography altered the very ontology of art. For Benjamin, mechanical reproduction severed the bond between work and tradition, replacing singular presence with infinite copies. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (Benjamin, 1969, p. 4). The authority of the unique object was undermined when its image could be multiplied and disseminated to mass audiences.

This transformation reordered the constellation of concepts. Creativity became technical and collaborative: the montage of a film or the orchestration of a newsreel could not be reduced to an individual genius. The very notion of genius — so central to Romantic aesthetics — lost ground to the collective mechanisms of the studio. Eternal value gave way to historical contingency, while mystery dissipated under the lens of reproducibility.

Benjamin also highlighted the shift from cult value to exhibition value. Artworks were no longer embedded primarily in ritual but were created for display, circulation, and mass reception. Perception itself was reorganized: cinema demanded distraction rather than contemplation, collective rather than solitary attention. Shock effects, rapid montage, and close-ups restructured sensory experience.

In the political sphere, these changes could serve either progressive or reactionary ends. Fascism sought to aestheticize politics, while communism, in Benjamin’s view, aimed to politicize art. The very categories of aura, authenticity, and uniqueness were no longer metaphysical absolutes but historically situated terms whose meaning shifted with the technology of reproduction.

Today: Algorithmic Reproduction and AI

Our contemporary moment is witnessing another rupture. If Benjamin analyzed the consequences of mechanical reproduction, we now confront the implications of algorithmic generation. Digital art, generative design, and AI-produced images or texts destabilize concepts in new ways.

Creativity is increasingly distributed across networks of humans and machines. What once denoted an inspired act by a singular individual now often refers to processes of recombination within vast datasets. Similarly, genius is displaced from the person to the system. A large language model, trained on millions of texts, simulates brilliance through statistical patterns, challenging the Romantic myth of the solitary creator.

The notion of eternal value struggles in an era defined by infinite mutability. Digital works are endlessly revisable, and memes or generative outputs proliferate without stable identity. In this flux, authenticity is redefined through technological fixes such as blockchain or NFTs, which attempt to restore singularity in a dematerialized context.

Mystery, far from vanishing, takes a new form. No longer anchored in the sacred, it emerges in the opacity of algorithmic processes. The “black box” of machine learning becomes a locus of enigma, where even creators cannot fully account for outputs. Aura might not disappear but migrate: it may attach to provenance, context, or the lived experience of interacting with generative systems.

Reception too is reconfigured. Where Benjamin described collective distraction in the cinema, today’s attention is fragmented and hyper-individualized by algorithmic feeds. Personalization engines curate aesthetic experience, producing not a mass audience but a multitude of parallel micro-publics. In this sense, AI reshapes not only the categories of art but also the very conditions of spectatorship.

Conclusion

Tracing these concepts across three stages reveals how profoundly their meaning depends on material conditions. In pre-modern contexts, creativity, genius, and authenticity were anchored in permanence, ritual, and transcendence. In Benjamin’s era, mechanical reproduction dissolved these values, foregrounding reproducibility, exhibition, and mass reception. Today, the algorithmic revolution pushes the transformation further: aura, mystery, and uniqueness are not extinguished but transposed into new domains of information, provenance, and algorithmic opacity.

As Saussure argued of linguistic signs, these categories acquire meaning relationally, not in isolation. Benjamin’s vocabulary thus provides not a fixed lexicon but a shifting system through which art’s changing ontology can be read. Reconsidering these concepts in light of AI invites us to ask anew what creativity, genius, or aura might signify when art is no longer bound by stone, pigment, or even mechanical reproduction, but by data, pixels, and code.

References

Benjamin, W. (1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans., pp. 217–252). Schocken.

Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the power of judgment (P. Guyer & E. Matthews, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1790).

Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in general linguistics (P. Meisel & H. Saussy, Eds.; W. Baskin, Trans.). Columbia University Press.