Commentary: Museums and movie theaters are reopening, but you won t see me in one. Not until summer Charles McNulty
Cultural organizations are among the business sectors that have been given the green light to reopen in Los Angeles this week. Museums will at long last be allowed to welcome back art lovers, who have missed basking in the presence of venerated masterpieces and avant-garde vision.
Walter Benjamin didn t need to spend a year looking at pictures on the internet to conclude, in his watershed 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, that the aura of a visual work withers when technologically copied, a process that detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. I’m pretty sure I’ll shed tears of gratitude the next time I’m standing before a Turner or Monet, but I doubt I’ll be roaming the galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before the summer.
LACMA CEO and director Michael Govan. Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for LACMA.
Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most consequential developments coming out of the art world and art market. Here’s what you need to know on this Tuesday, March 16.
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A German Prince Wants His Family Treasures Back From Germany – Georg Friedrich Prinz von Preussen, a descendant of the Hohenzollern dynasty (which reigned over the former Prussian empire), is on a quest to recover his family’s art and artifacts. The bourgeois businessman believes that the royal treasures, confiscated in Eastern Germany after World War II and transferred to museum collections, are rightfully his but the courts could dismiss his claim if it is found that his great-grandfather was a supporter of the Nazi party. (
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Cultural organizations are among the business sectors that have been given the green light to reopen in Los Angeles this week. Museums will at long last be allowed to welcome back art lovers, who have missed basking in the presence of venerated masterpieces and avant-garde vision.
Walter Benjamin didn’t need to spend a year looking at pictures on the internet to conclude, in his watershed 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” that the “aura” of a visual work “withers” when technologically copied, a process that “detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” I’m pretty sure I’ll shed tears of gratitude the next time I’m standing before a Turner or Monet, but I doubt I’ll be roaming the galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before the summer.
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