David Cox writes: "Images are themselves a lens on the culture which makes them. Walter
Benjamin was both right and wrong about art in the age of mechanical
reproduction. He was correct in stating that as images proliferate, their
overall commercial value in depreciates. He was wrong in assuming that
manufactured images are worth less than their 'real world' referent.



As manufactured goods accelerate away from the decade in which they were
made, they themselves gain a kind of new cultural value. Some commodities
seem to accrue more cultural gravitas than others. The dodgiest of global
trade in junk, the antique market bears testimony to the ways in which
even the most trivial of manufactured items can become obscure objects of
desire once made to enter the domain commodity relations.
manufactured images are worth less than their 'real world' referent.



Read the whole essay athttp://www.netspace.net.au/~dcox/lens.html"