The aura's present decay is based in two circumstances, which are "both linked to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely: the desire of the present-day masses to 'get closer' to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing's uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction."
"The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose 'sense' for sameness in the world has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing significance of statistics. The alignment of reality with the masses and of the masses with reality is a process of immeasurable importance for both thinking and perception."
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" in Selected Writings,
vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), pp. 255-256. [Underlining Mine]
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