Vancouver's auratic geographies

In the 1930s, when Walter Benjamin undertook his analysis of the “Work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility,” reproduction technology was in its infancy. In contemporary Vancouver, the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is the preeminent visual arts institution, and is thoroughly implicated in the city’s cultural landscape. By drawing on Benjamin’s conception of the aura of artworks and the concomitant cultural politics of art, this thesis argues that the VAG is engaged in seemingly contradictory practices. To do this, I examine an exhibition and the photographic practices at the VAG to reveal both an embrace of autonomous, auratic art and the “politicization of art”—practices purported by Benjamin to be in ideological opposition. By positing that the VAG’s socio-political power originates in the aura of art, I uncover how the Gallery engages in both progressive and conservative politics of art in Vancouver.