Switch off your phone and get lost in a gallery | Letters
I was pleased to read Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett's criticism of selfie culture - every aspect of life has been gatecrashed by the mobile phone (Art, aura and the search for a perfect selfie, 22 August). However, as John Berger pointed out in Ways of Seeing (indebted to Walter Benjamin), the withering of the aura of a work of art is to be celebrated, because aura shrouds the work of art in a veil of false religiosity.
Many modern artworks, such as those in film and photography (media that Benjamin advocated), are no longer necessarily unique one-offs. The fact that film is reproducible and distributed en masse does not adversely affect our viewing. I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood this week knowing that other copies of the film were being watched in cinemas internationally. In other words, the artwork - if you would agree that film can be an artwork - does not require the quality of one-offness to be valued. If a thing is appreciated simply for its uniqueness, which is more or less attributable to many things, not just artworks, there are other factors being overlooked. The gallery provides a space for the viewer to interact with the work on both a physical and mental - conceptual - level. Considerations of cultural contexts and history play a part. Anyone looking at their phone in a gallery shouldn't have bothered leaving the house; they brought the house with them. My gallery-going advice: switch off the phone, dump the aura and get lost.
Stuart Cumberland
London