The Variable Museum

This thesis paper discusses the theory and motivation behind The Variable Museum project. Section 1 describes my personal methods for creating artwork that discourages the negative effects of what Walter Benjamin termed ‘aura’, the sense of uniqueness and importance that an artwork gains through its recognition as art. Though Benjamin believed that reproduction would eliminate the unique history and thus the aura of an artwork, the near century that has passed since his original writing has shown that he was only partially correct. Aura has been extended to be almost as easily conferred upon a class of objects as upon a single work, and deliberate attempts to disrupt it have largely failed. While a reproduced artwork will still accumulate aura, it is possible that a constantly regenerated work may be able to mitigate its negative effects.

Section 2 discusses the conception of The Variable Museum as an artwork. The piece was developed as a method of presenting different artifacts of art to individuals within a shared space and encouraging discussion of those artifacts between members of a group. The goal of this presentation is to induce a shared, ephemeral artwork generated by the discussion of individual artifacts. This induced work is intended to fulfill the requirements of an aura-resistant artwork as described in section 1.