Portigal Consulting | steve@portigal.com
Lodestar | stokesjo@gmail.com
[ 1] Spooner, B. “Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
November + December 2009
interactions
While in Las Vegas for the first time a number of years ago, we had occasion to visit the Las Vegas Hilton where “Star Trek: The Experience” was operating. The immersive “themed attraction” spilled over into a cafe (Quark’s Bar and Restaurant) and shopping area both modeled after the TV show “Star Trek: Deep Space 9.” This led to slightly dissonant sights, such as an Andorian sitting at a table hawking credit card offers, where the free gift was a plastic sports bottle topped with an Andorian head. As we strolled through the Deep Space 9 Promenade, we came upon two Klingons. Of course, it was two actors portraying Klingons, but let’s set that important difference aside for a moment. They were chatting with tourists and posing for pictures. Eagerly waiting for his moment was a young boy with Down’s Syndrome, wearing a James T. Kirk T-shirt. (Some quick back-story: In the lore of “Star Trek,” Kirk and the Klingons were enemies.) As these two Klingons chatted with the boy and posed for a picture with him, the actors delivered a magical experience as they maintained character and gruffly acknowledged (just gruffly enough) the boy’s T-shirt and what it represented to them. They found a way to be kind to a vulnerable person
while not destroying what he was there to appreciate: the essence of their Klingon-ness, their “Star Trek”-ness. Given that we were in Vegas, where a veneer of grandiosity often stands in for authenticity, this was a touching and impressive moment.
What do we mean by authenticity, and why is it so important to us now?
Calling something “authentic” may connote original, traditional, indigenous, old, rare, the real thing, or in some crucial way a better example of its category. We use the term today as a messy amalgam of its twin roots: the art historian’s validation of an object and the philosopher’s valuing of the true self. While the concept of authenticity is employed in vague and subjective ways, we want to believe that an item’s authenticity is an absolutely determinable quality, an expectation that (as you’ll see) is not wholly realistic.
As for “Why authenticity now?” a likely reason is our unprecedented awareness that the identity of products, objects, and brands has never before been more subject to the forces of marketing and spin. This awareness drives us to identify sources that are “truly authentic” (a sort of arms race of terminology, while implying the
modified adjective here is itself becoming devalued).
Pine and Gilmore (in their book Authenticity) explore the prevalence of the opposite: fakery and inauthenticity. But they also shy away from a tight definition of the term, instead framing it as a quality of product that we consume because of our own self-image (rather than an intrinsic quality of the item itself). Spooner (an anthropologist who studied “Oriental” carpets) also emphasizes the act of projection in seeking and consuming authenticity:
“Authenticity is a form of cultural discrimination projected onto objects. But it does not in fact inhere in the object but derives from our concern with it. In seeking authenticity people are able to use commodities to express themselves” [ 1].
But it gets more complex if you consider that authenticity is not a binary attribute. There is space between the truly authentic and the brutally inauthentic. Let’s look at the area in the middle of that continuum, something we’re calling “fake authenticity.” Consider the molded plastic lawn and garden products that serve as storage containers and poolside speakers, or the cell towers designed to resemble trees. While in the past we might have easily classified these as inauthentic, we submit that they’ve become
References:
Archives