It’s All & Nothing About the Benjamins
The One, Two, Many Benjamins
Have you ever tried to find the right word for something that was there, and then wasn’t?
Not quite authenticity. Not quite presence. Not beauty, and certainly not craftsmanship. Something quieter. Something that seems to cling to an original and disappear, almost imperceptibly, from everything made after it.
Walter Benjamin had a word for it: aura.
For Benjamin, aura is the strange experience of encountering something that is completely there, physically and undeniably, yet somehow remains beyond ordinary possession. His famous description is a “unique presence of a distance, however near it may be.”
It is the distance that matters.
An original work exists once, in one particular body of time. It has its own history, its own material existence, its own trail of having been there. A reproduction may show the same image, reproduce every brushstroke, every colour, every detail. Yet it does not carry the same here and now. It gives the eyes the information. It does not give them the encounter.
Reproduction, in biology, creates.
Reproduction, in art, can subtract.
Take the Mona Lisa. It can travel to Tokyo and back without ceasing to be the Mona Lisa, because its singularity is not dependent on where it happens to hang. Wherever the original is, it remains the one object that has passed through all those years, all those rooms, all those gazes. A million reproductions can travel further, faster and more cheaply. None of them acquires its particular history simply by looking exactly like it.
And then there was Frédy.
An uncle to a girl of ten, a lifelong artist by trade, he drew at family gatherings while everyone else made conversation. There was never any proper paper and he did not ask for any. Once the grandfather had finished reading the newspaper, before coffee, he folded it and left it on the table, Frédy simply took it.
Which, to the girl, was already rather daring.
Children were supposed to draw on blank paper, or in colouring books. There were rules about these things, even if nobody had ever bothered to write them down. The newspaper belonged to grown-ups. It had been read, folded, placed on the table. It was not a page waiting for a child’s imagination.
Frédy seemed to have missed that particular memo.
He drew anyway.
Comic little scenes. Caricatures. A private joke told to no one, in ink, while the table carried on around him.
Sometimes a portrait of her.
Sometimes something else entirely, rendered with such precision that it startled her.
To everyone else, they were doodles on yesterday’s newspaper. Small things made almost absent-mindedly between the coffee and the conversation, forgotten before the cups had been cleared.
To her, Frédy had just broken out of something. He didn’t consciously rebel. He simply seemed to have missed the memo saying it was not allowed.
That was the beauty of it.
Frédy was an adult she did not see very often, and one she looked up to. Which made the whole thing even more astonishing. This was not another child testing a boundary. This was a grown man, apparently free of a rule she had accepted as part of the natural order of things.
He took a rule she had never thought to question and simply threw it overboard. He did what he believed he could do, because apparently nobody had told him he couldn’t. And somehow, without getting up from his chair, he seemed to have taken her hand and run off to Wonderland.
Their bodies remained at the family gathering, politely surrounded by the same voices and the same conversations. But for a little while, they were elsewhere. She watched the newspaper change under his hand and felt the strange exhilaration of discovering that the world might contain doors where adults had only ever shown her walls.
She never asked to keep any of the drawings. She had been raised to be polite, and asking seemed somehow too close to trespassing. So she watched instead, with the concentration of a partner in crime. She noticed the hand moving across the paper, the sudden likeness appearing from nowhere, the little pause before the next line.
She became a witness.
There was no audience. No commission. No proper paper. No intention of permanence. No noble surface, no frame waiting at the end of the afternoon.
He had simply found a way to make something without disturbing the rest of the world. And perhaps that was precisely what made them whole.
The drawings were not valuable because they were rare.
They were rare because they had happened.
The Mona Lisa is aura with a price attached to it, or at least with a price imagined around it. Its hypothetical insurance value is often placed somewhere in the hundreds of millions of euros, even though the painting itself is not for sale.
Frédy’s sketches were aura with no price at all.
Most were thrown away with the newspaper on the same day.
And here the two Benjamins begin to meet.
Money has nothing to do with aura, but it has an enormous amount to do with what people do once they sense it.
Money can turn singularity into scarcity, scarcity into prestige, prestige into a market. It can buy the painting, the ticket, the seat in the room, the right to stand in front of the original for three minutes while a hundred other people wait behind the rope.
But money cannot buy the thing Benjamin was trying to describe.
It can bring someone closer to the object.
It cannot remove the distance.
Perhaps that is why the idea of aura feels so familiar even outside museums.
Consider Sean Connery.
Some people would say he had aura without needing to explain what they mean. He could enter a scene and seem to alter its temperature. The voice, the stillness, the particular way of occupying a suit, the sense that he was entirely comfortable taking up the space he was in. It was not simply attractiveness, nor talent, nor fame. Plenty of beautiful and talented people have neither that quality nor that effect.
There was a distance around him.
And yet this is where Benjamin’s aura and the modern use of the word part company.
Sean Connery’s aura was not the aura of a painting. It was charisma, presence, mythology, the accumulated effect of a person becoming larger than the individual who stands in front of the camera. Cinema helped create it through repetition: photographs, films, interviews, posters, appearances, the same face reproduced thousands of times.
Benjamin might have found that wonderfully complicated.
The more an image is reproduced, the more familiar it becomes. And yet sometimes reproduction creates another kind of distance. A person becomes so visible that the person himself begins to feel unreachable.
The same thing happens with art.
A reproduction can tell someone what the Mona Lisa looks like. It can even make the image more familiar than the original ever could be. But familiarity is not presence. Information is not encounter.
The original remains stubbornly itself.
Perhaps this is also why a small drawing on a family table can carry something that a million-euro object does not. The value of Frédy’s sketch was never in the paper. It was in the fact that he had been there, making it, and someone had been there to see it happen.
It had no market value.
It had something harder to measure.
Worth, perhaps, is the word that comes closest.
Not the worth assigned by a market, but the strange human worth of something that cannot be replaced because replacing it would mean losing the very circumstances that made it matter.
Aura does not tell us what something costs.
It tells us why, sometimes, the loss of the thing itself would matter.
And perhaps that is the little secret hidden inside the distance: the closer something comes to being completely reproducible, the more we begin to understand what cannot be reproduced at all.
A painting can be copied.
A drawing can be thrown away.
A face can be photographed a thousand times.
And still, somewhere between the object and the person looking at it, something remains that cannot be printed, priced, packed, reproduced or taken home.
Something that was there.
And then, somehow, wasn’t.
© 2026 A.K. for MYELF / NOM. This text may be linked to and shared, NOT copied or reproduced elsewhere.