The revised translation of the title of Walter Benjamin's famous 1935 essay—from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”—signaled a shift in its use value for those interested in understanding the kinds of work that images do within capitalist modernity. A more exact translation of “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischer Reproduzierbarkeit,” the new title also oriented English-language readers closer to Benjamin's major preoccupations in the essay, away from the cherry-picking within artworlds that had reduced its relevance for aesthetic inquiry to the commonplace idea that the widespread circulation of multiple photographs of individual works of art had caused them to lose the “aura” that they possessed when seen in their original niche in time and space.

Underlying this banality, however, was a concept of consequence for understanding that capitalism was building a new kind of engine room, a society-wide apparatus. Benjamin's insight was a major update of Plato's pairing of deceptive shadows and ideal Forms, Nikephoros’ icon/image double vision, and Marx's identification of the inner dynamic of commodification as the interplay of use and exchange value. Taking “art” to be the entirety of human visual representation, he introduced a distinction that constituted the next big step in thinking about image economies:

In modern times, icons produced during what were now seen as the primitive, ancient, and medieval eras were everywhere abstracted from their millennia-long grounding in ritual practices and valued as independent works of art. In Nikephoros’ terms, they become images. Not natural, nor spiritual, but aesthetic images. Suitable above all for display among other images that have been similarly transposed. All classified according to their place within a transcendent History of Art. This transvaluation occurs in museums, as it does in the museumization of churches and other sacred places.