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Virtual galleries
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A house in the virtual world Second Life (Image copyright 2003, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Virtual and real art
What would a personalized virtual museum do to the aura of the artworks? Is Walter Benjamin right? Would the creation of your own equivalent of the Miho Museum's dramatic small gallery with a single statue in it destroy or enhance the aura of the object? The museum puffs up the aura by their labels and their space and lighting effects. Now suppose you were in your living room in your pajamas, with a VR set that put you into such a virtual gallery. . .Could the ritual use that Benjamin thinks is now disappearing come to be re-emphasized in idiosyncratic one-person rituals? If you had a "private showing" of the Mona Lisa in your own VR gallery, what would you do? Would it bother you that others might be using the object in different ways? Scrawling mustaches on it? Using it for unspeakable rites? Duplicating it on coffee mugs? Would the aura persist or change or die as you faced the painting in your own virtual space? Would the social grammar of "museum" dominate you even in that private world?