Before the advent of film, actors stood on stage as both artist and art for live audiences. The use of film to mechanically record an actor’s performance (their art) helped to spur Walter Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Benjamin discusses photographs, lithographs, and film as he explores the aura and the cult and exposition value of reproduced art. For Benjamin, reproductions lack presence in time and space. Although he primarily discusses images, I suggest an actor or a performer should be considered both as an artist and as the canvas for his or her own art. Unlike the stage actor whose aura is accessible to the live audience, the film actor’s art is always a mechanical reproduction. In our contemporary popular culture, the phenomenon of celebrity challenges the aura of proximity and space by providing audiences with an intimate yet false relationship with an actor. The exuberance of celebrity is not bound to time and space like the aura.

 In this essay, I explore the phenomenon of celebrity and its intersection with Benjamin’s ideas on aura, exhibition, and cult value using Shia LaBeouf as a case study. Struggling with the idea of celebrity, fame, and his art, LaBeouf began a performance art piece entitled #IAMSORRY that evokes the 1970’s and the performance art of Chris Burden, Yoko Ono, and Marina Abramović. Engaging the writings of P. David Marshall, Hamish Pringle, and Barrie Guner, I will explore how celebrity affects the aura of the actor as a living, breathing work of art and the subsequent exposition and cult value of the art à la Benjamin.