With his famous artistic adaptation of Sandro Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" (1482, Uffizi Gallery, Florence), Warhol defined, in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, an artistic new beginning and thus the end of traditional art. In 1936, the art-historically important essay "Reflexion und Aura. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" (Reflection and Aura: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility) was published by the philosopher and art critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin lamented the progressive decline of the auratic through the new possibilities of technical reproduction and thus an increasing devaluation of the artistic original. According to Benjamin, the ubiquitous reception possibilities of art, through photography and film, heralded the end of traditional art. In America, Benjamin's theses of an artistic avant-garde were made public in early 1969 through Hannah Arendt’s anthology "Illuminations. Walter Benjamnin: Essays and Reflections", which would become the basis of contemporary art-theoretical discourse. Warhol, the undisputed master of American pop art, however, made everything that Benjamin believed would signify the end of art his artistic trademark: Warhol’s art is serial, striking and, through the use of photo-based silkscreen printing, negates not only the claim to originality but at the same time to a manual execution. This way Warhol liberated art from the shackles of aura. [JS]