This book defends the idea that the artistic transformations of modernity help us understand what the system in question consisted of, and vice versa, since it is within the framework of tradition that the creative revolutions of the last hundred years. The (dis) order of modern art is thus evidenced in a few core issues: emergence and expansion of the 'panopticon' mode of vision; appearance of real movement overcoming frozen or illusory movement; attention to the different primitivisms as alternatives to the paralyzing prestige of the western canon; increasing autonomy of the real object as opposed to the fictitious one, with the more recent irruption of virtual entities; appropriation of the land as a horizontal territory of creation; and finally, reevaluation of the Benjaminian notion of the aura, which was not lost in current societies but would have been extended to each reproduction or each creative gesture. Juan Antonio Ramírez maintains that if modernity has produced something comparable to the Renaissance visual order, in force for several centuries, it does not seem logical to accept its closure a few decades after its birth. The object and the aura is an unusual book for its desire to pose the great problems of contemporary art in the historical perspective of "long duration", overcoming the "short time" of events privileged by the usual art critic.