Many recording artists are dead, and all eventually will be. Even when they are alive, their submission to waxing (to use the old term) or to entombment in vinyl or polyvinyl chloride is an intimation of immortality, and therefore of mortality… The record listener and the musician—like the stargazer and the star, like a man and his familiar ghost—do not inhabit the same world. Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel
By this point the student of Walter Benjamin will be on edge. Mechanical reproduction, he [sic] will object, destroys the ritual value of a work of art, its “aura.” How can a cheap copy of art, like a poster or a record, figure in a ritual? Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel
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