Is authenticity just labeling?
"Good" and "authentic" are not synonyms
You don’t have to look far to see that people are obsessed with authenticity—the real, genuine, bona fide. Authenticity is obviously status, where more is better, and lack of it is an artistic failing and probably a moral failing too.
Now, I’m a sad middle aged child of the 1990s who believes that selling out is real and bad and that authenticity is a fundamental and essential element of artistic creation and consumption; I believe in those widely-mocked old-school values, and I think my relationship to the art I create and consume is deepened because of that belief.
Never before in history has authenticity been in such short supply. That’s so much the case, that the very word authenticity is mocked…. I know people who get angry just from hearing the word authenticity. They insist it doesn’t exist. It never existed. It can’t possibly exist. And maybe in their lives, as digitally constructed, it doesn’t.
As with every other kind of status, purity competitions are not far behind. Rural people are more authentic than city-dwellers, or acoustic music is more authentic than electric, or anything involving computers is less than genuine.
Purity debates are tedious and unedifying. There’s even an amusing category of “real replicas” which tries to apply purity testing to replica automobiles. Real replicas are more authentic, don’t ya know. Authenticity, however, is interesting, and in serious need of less veneration and more critical examination. That’s what I’m here for.
I thought I’d start off talking about cars. But, as I’ll show by the end, my arguments are generalizable.
Check out the car below. It crashed, caught on fire, and then a building fell on it during Hurricane Charley. After all that this wreck sold for $1.875 million in 2023, presumably to someone with more money than brains.
Here’s what a pristine version looks like:
Transforming that twisted pile of junk into the second picture will probably be another $2 million. More than that, think about how much will need to be replaced. The engine, carpeting, upholstery, steering wheel, gauges, wiring, hoses, wheels, tires, exhaust system, battery, headlights, windshield, brakes, paint, clutch, gearbox. That’s off the top of my head. Actually a better question is how much of that wrecked sheetmetal can be straightened out and saved whatsoever.
You probably think I’m about to raise a Ship of Theseus problem here. I’m not. Yes, the Ship of Theseus is a very difficult metaphysical issue around since antiquity, when Plutarch reported that even then it was a “standing example among the philosophers.”1 I’m not asking whether the wrecked Ferrari is the same car after nearly every part of it is replaced with brand-new components. I’m asking the related but distinct question of whether the end product will be an authentic Ferrari 500 Mondial at all.
Let’s approach the question from a slightly different angle. Consider a car like this replica 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder.
Bespoke built by Seduction Motorsports in 2013, the shape, size, contour, layout, and chassis are all to the original 1955 Porsche design. The engine is air-cooled with a manual transmission, the gauges are period design, as are the wheels. The carpeting is German square-weave wool, and it has the historically correct Porsche badging along with a wooden Nardi steering wheel.
Not an authentic Porsche, right? Because it wasn’t made by Porsche in Stuttgart? Well, the engine in the pictured car is a 1776cc Volkswagen crate engine made in Germany. The Volkswagen company owns the Porsche company, but the Porsche family is the largest shareholder of Volkswagen AG. Volkswagen AG makes loads of different engines with different kinds of specs in various locations. Some Porsche-branded engines (for the Panamera, Cayenne, and Macan) are made in an Audi plant in Hungary. Porsche and VW also share parts. For example, the Porsche 914 four-cylinder car used a flat-four engine made at the VW plant in Salzgitter, the exact same engine that was also used in a VW Type-2 bus.
Whether the engine in the replica 550 Spyder is an “authentic Porsche engine” is completely due to how it is branded by Volkswagen AG and nothing else. Furthermore, the parent company could have easily and legally called it a Porsche engine and no one would have batted an eye.
Clearly where a car or its parts are made tells us nothing about authenticity. How about the manufacturer? An authentic Porsche is made by Porsche, right? This is less clear than you might think. Car companies change hands. A lot. Jaguar was originally founded in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company and didn’t start making cars until 12 years later. Since then it has been owned by British Motor Corporation, merged with Leyland Motor Corporation, privatized as Jaguar again, bought by Ford Motor Company, and is now owned by India’s Tata Motors. So an authentic Jaguar is just a car made by whomever owns the name.
Then there’s continuation cars. Some well-known companies discontinued models that then became popular collector’s items, so—many years later—they built a few more for the collector market. For example, between 2017-2017 Jaguar built nine XKSS cars to the exact 1957 spec. In 2020-2021 Aston Martin made a couple dozen DB5 coupes to match the 1964 model used by James Bond in Goldfinger, including Bond gadgets like rotating license plates, machine guns, and an ejector seat.
In the 1960s, Ford built the GT40 as a race car (famously depicted in the film Ford vs. Ferrari). The South African company Superformance now builds GT40 continuation cars under official license, and they are so accurate that they are recognized as legitimate by Safir GT40 Spares Ltd., the company that owns the GT40 trademark. The Superformance GT40s are legally considered “GT40s” and their chassis numbers follow the original numbering sequence. Complicating this already complicated story is that Ford made GT road cars (2005–2006 and 2017–2022) that were Ford’s own modern reinterpretations of the original GT40. Only legal naming issues could stop Ford from calling them GT40s.
What counts as an authentic GT40? There seems to be no more to it than some kind of connection to an historical tradition coupled with the legal ability to name a car. A GT40, by any other name, drives as sweet.
Is a 2021 Aston Martin DB5 Bond car, a working car that is not street-legal because it fails to meet modern crash and emissions regulations, an authentic DB5? The original certainly didn’t have machine guns, only the movie prop car did. It’s better to view it in terms of hyperrealism.
Hyperrealism in painting and sculpture originally grew out of photorealism, and is characterized by a convincing, high-resolution depiction of a simulated reality. Jean Baudrillard writes, “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”2
Umberto Eco offers many popular examples from an American road trip: copies of mermaid hoaxes that populate Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museums, authentic duplicates that are somehow more genuine than one in the gift shop; old copies of a portrait of Napoleon, fakes now celebrated as historical and thus garbed in authenticity; art museums that are a bricolage of creative reconstruction and true antiquity but present themselves as the most realistic depiction of an imagined past.
Here’s a nice example of the hyperreal. As part of a charity stunt, a few years ago Arnold Schwarzenegger was made up to look like the Terminator. He went to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in Hollywood, temporarily replacing their wax figure of the Terminator. Museum-goers taking selfies were startled when the “wax” statue came to life and put his arms around them. On his walk from special effects makeup to the wax museum, Schwarzenegger encountered a street performer who was dressed as the Terminator and was posing with tourists for tips. They had a humorous debate, in character, about who was, in fact, the authentic Terminator.
Of course, Schwarzenegger is no more the authentic Terminator than the street performer, even if his portrayal is more iconic; both are men playacting at something that was never real to start with. Yet there is a clear sense in which Schwarzenegger’s simulacrum of the Terminator is a more realistic, superior version of the imaginary movie character than a wax figure or a street performer. He is better at pretending to be a fake thing.
This kind of artistry is everywhere, yet too many people are convinced that if they can somehow strip off the layers of the phony and the pretend, they can finally expose what’s truly authentic. But art is the making of new worlds that are sometimes impossible ones; a lot of art just is pretend.
Paul McCartney’s guitar solo in “Taxman” is tape-reversed and played backwards, as is Rick Wakeman’s fading minor piano chord at the beginning of “Roundabout.” They cannot be played live. Jazz pianist Bill Evans played multiple parts with himself (through overdubbing) on Conversations With Myself, which one performer could never do in a single performance. Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline had independently cut the song “I Fall to Pieces” in a similar key. Nashville producers Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley lifted Reeve’s and Cline’s isolated vocal performances off their original 3-track stereo master session tapes, resynchronized them, added new backing tracks, and turned it into a duet. Reeves and Cline were both already dead when they sang together.
Sound designer Vytis Puronas writes,
By using an algorithmic reverberation processor and adjusting its virtual room size, reverb decay time, early reflections, virtual surfaces and other parameters it is possible to simulate a hyper-real space. A sense of authenticity can be further enhanced by emphasizing or removing certain frequencies, creating resonances, enriching or impoverishing a sound source, delaying, layering, and so on. These are common techniques…
Authenticity is intentionally manufactured in the studio, in the factory, and this is not a bad thing. It’s not some scam wicked capitalist corporations are pulling on us as we doomscroll our way to self-inflicted misery. Art includes hyperrealism, the recreation of 60-year-old cars, musical recordings that can’t be played live, and actors portraying characters that could never be real. Asking whether a completely rebuilt and reconstructed Ferrari 500 Mondial is authentic 1954 Ferrari means little more than asking if posthumous duets are authentic performances.
I see art as a kaleidoscope, each artist twisting the scope as new creations appear. It’s an endless collage, addition, and rearrangement, like getting snippets of code from Stack Overflow to write your program. It is creative destruction. Jimi Hendrix took Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” and made something new out of it, so much so that even Dylan has said, “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way… Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it’s a tribute to him in some kind of way.” Dylan recognized that his own song was turned into something different.
Art is evolution, finding good tricks for survival, forgetting them, and building them up all over again. It’s taking good mutations and replicating them until they too mutate into something else in novel circumstances. What animal has the authentic claws or wings or eyes? The question is meaningless.
Far better that we focus on whether a bit of art is good art, instead of obsessing about authenticity, a concept vague at best and useless at worst. It is good art that matters.
And naturally made more difficult since, notably by Thomas Hobbes in De Corpore.
Entertainingly, Baudrillard’s book opens with this epigraph: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. –Ecclesiastes” Of course, no such quotation exists in Ecclesiastes; the epigraph is a fabrication.
Magical essay. Jean Baudrillard also had the advantage of a good sense of humour.
+1 for reminding me of Roundabout. Hadn't listened to that in a long time, it's a real trip!