It feels a bit strange

It feels a bit strange being in Chicago with Walter Benjamin, particularly since he’s been dead for seventy years, but he’s sprightly and invigorating company. Very challenging yesterday in the Chicago Institute on the cultic and display value of art as we stood and watched people taking pictures of a Gaugin with their high-powered lenses. Herr Benjamin (it will be a while before I call him ‘Waltie’) was tickled when I took a photo with my phone of a man taking pictures with his phone. ‘I knew this would happen,’ he said, and he did.

This morning in Millennium Park Herr Benjamin was beside himself again as we stood beneath Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’. All around us in the blazing sunshine people were taking photos of reflections of themselves. ‘It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind all those years ago,’ he said, ‘but I think it stands: “The reproduced work of art is to an ever-increasing extent the reproduction of a work of art designed for reproducibility.”’

‘This is great,’ he said skipping around Kapoor’s enormous pillow of polished metal. ‘The artist has designed something that exists almost entirely to be photographed. Wonderful.’ ‘Yes, but people really seem to love it, Herr Benjamin,’ I said. ‘Yes, yes, progressive, progressive, democratic and progressive,’ he said, and toddled off in search of an iPad.

Ann Rippin