PBS Arts Off Book

Watch Off Book: Visual Culture Online on PBS. See more from OFF BOOK.

This is a PBS documentary series loosely related to the 'arts'. It's very slickly produced, and interviews the very fashionable in New York City. If you find a great cynicism welling up in yourself while watching these, I think it is forgivable. Perhaps the best description of this particular series of videos is that they highlight a number of popular cultural trends that have probably just reached their apex and are now sloping downwards.

NYC Skyline

Matteo Pericoli

Being on the precipice of the 9/11 ten year anniversary I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about the New York City skyline. In my Technology in the Art Room class, my group happened to pick the skyline as an example of an iconic image and how it fits in with Walter Benjamin's theory of Aura. His description is somewhat ellusive, but many appear to take it as a form of 'authenticity'. That's hard to imagine considering experts go to great lengths to authenticate questionable works and authentication is often given in the form of a written document for a particular work.

A better analogue for the idea of aura might be 'presence'. The point being that the presence of a particular artwork is lost in the reproduction of that work. Eitherway, the New Yorker Magazine recently featured an artist specifically for his illustrations of the NYC skyline. They discuss in part how the loss of the twin towers affects his work. Could it be said the skyline lost some of its aura with the change?