making things special is what museums do

"Reverence for the experience will replace reverence for the object."

"All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores."

In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Walter Benjamin famously argued that our desire to experience the authentic has been hampered by the engines of mass production. We no longer really know whether something is the original or the copy. It's not the artifact that has changed, but our expectations. We prize originality not just because we don't have it; we wouldn't even recognize it if we did. We prize the specific original, the name brand if you will, because it makes us feel special and it is that experience that is at the heart of Museumworld.

The museum experience, like the religious experience it mimics, is carried in an aura that implies the unique. There is no copy. That's its brandstory. In other words, art is the story we tell about an object and getting the object into the museum is an important part of the story. Perhaps, that's why the museum and the machine develop concurrently. They depend on each other. If the machine says, let's make the same thing over and over, the museum says let's not.

The museum experience, like the religious experience it mimics, is carried in an aura that implies the unique. There is no copy. That's its brandstory.

- James Twitchell