Dalla copia al falso al ‘secondo originale’ Percorsi di slittamento di senso e di significato tra materiale e virtuale

The article investigates the relationship between ‘copy’ and ‘fake’ and the ambiguous status of these definitions in the artistic practices of recent decades. Episodes narrated in art history primary sources are compared with twentieth and twenty-first-century episodes. Thus, one comes to the notion of fake in contemporaneity, which no longer has a negative meaning. On the contrary, it has become an acknowledged artistic practice, a means that reveals the mise-en-scène that each image represents by declaring itself as ‘true’. Also, the notion of a ‘second original’, obtained thanks to contemporary technologies, calls into question the Benjaminian notion of the artwork’s ‘aura’.