Columbia University, April 17-18, 2009. 
Generously supported by the Dept of Art History and Archaeology (Columbia University), and the Sterling Currier Fund. 

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Nineteenth-century France – or more accurately, Paris - has long been associated with an explosion of the visual. In the wake of the French Revolution, a combination of complex political, economic, social and cultural forces initiated an acceleration and multiplication of visual production and consumption. Crucial for this emerging culture of the visual was a shift from craft-based production to an industrial model of image-making centered on seriality and repetition. The fraught relationship between the rise of mass-reproduction and the formation of the modern institution of the museum, as well as the often contrary demands of the market, produced an unprecedented anxiety over issues of authenticity and originality. Perception itself increasingly unfolded in a murky atmosphere of proliferating copies, imitations, counterfeits and simulacra. For the nineteenth-century observer, modernity meant the traversal of these endlessly mirrored halls. This event will provide a timely reflection upon and reconsideration of modern theorizations of reproduction, from the suggestive and influential writings of Walter Benjamin to the more recent interventions of historians such as Stephen Bann.