Kylie Jenner's 21st Birthday Party

Something happens with objects, valuable objects in specific, when the camera makes them reproducible. John Berger explains In “Ways of Seeing” how imagery (art in this case) gains a false mystery and false religiosity (usually linked with cash value, but always invoked in the name of culture and civilization) as a substitute of what it lost when the camera made them reproducible. The network of the reproductions moves oppositely, the newfound religiosity of the object stands in bleak contrast with the quantity and quality of reproductions produced by a network of accelerated capitalism. In his theory of Simulacra Jean Baudrillard describes how we have evolved as a society towards a moment where, symbols (or simulacra) become false duplications of reality, conceal the absence of said reality and finally have no relation to any reality whatsoever. John Berger continues after his observations on the false religiosity of art: “I’m going to try to relate the experience of art directly to other experiences, and to use the means of reproduction as though they offered a language, as though pictures were like words rather than holy relics.”