The machine aesthetic that evolved in the early twentieth century took as its premise the notion that machinery could be seen to be beautiful. And yet what could be more artificial and cold than machinery? It is quite plausible that the impulse of the machine aesthetic stemmed from a perceived relationship between beauty and authenticity, so that a painting such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, for instance, with its mechanistic human anatomy, would somehow be a work of art that was real in the sense of its genuineness; it was a made thing about made things, in certain respects, and yet it took for itself the attributes we usually associate with natural, organic phenomena.
The things of nature are, arguably enough, authentic and can be utterly beautiful. Can we say the same for a poem, a painting, a piece of music, any or all of the arts, when they are pointedly “technological” in either or both style and theme? We have, certainly. How does the concept of originality play itself out within this scheme, insofar as what is technological is artificial, not natural?