Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­monsIn his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­ducibil­i­ty,” influ­en­tial Ger­man-Jew­ish crit­ic Wal­ter Ben­jamin intro­duced the term “aura” to describe an authen­tic expe­ri­ence of art. As Ben­jamin writes:The film responds to the shriv­el­ing of the aura with an arti­fi­cial build-up of the “per­son­al­i­ty” out­side the stu­dio. Fas­cism attempts to orga­nize the new­ly cre­at­ed pro­le­tar­i­an mass­es with­out affect­ing the prop­er­ty struc­ture which the mass­es strive to elim­i­nate. The mass­es have a right to change prop­er­ty rela­tions; Fas­cism seeks to give them an expres­sion while pre­serv­ing prop­er­ty. Ben­jamin ends the essay with a dis­cus­sion of how fas­cism aes­theti­cizes pol­i­tics to one end: the anni­hi­la­tion of aura by more per­ma­nent means.