The Lightness of a Patina

Alan Bulley, a former Canadian civil servant, analyses the mechanisms used by Canada's House of Commons to establish authority and authenticity by creating an aura of the ‘real’. Drawing on the concept of patina as a guarantor of authenticity proposed by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, Bulley identifies the evocation of patina in today's televised and photographed Commons through a deliberate appeal to tradition and historical artefacts, questioning how much this staging conceals of the vitality of Canada's parliamentary democracy.