Critics don’t always get it right. Especially when it comes to art and how it changes in response to technological developments—their predictions of the future are often merely guesses, at best.

In Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” it was predicted that aura and tradition, which characterized the art of the 18th and 19th centuries, would disappear as society became increasingly mechanized and mass produced. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” Benjamin wrote. “One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.”

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