sufficiently prevalent that they are identifiable by their own aesthetic. They aren’t inauthentic rocks and trees; they are authentic fake rocks and trees. The plastic food in the window of a Japanese restaurant isn’t inauthentic; a visit to Tokyo’s Kappabashi district, where stores are fully stocked with examples, reveals the authenticity of plastic food. Kitsch is another flavor of fake authenticity, a celebration of not just trash, but specifically trashy versions of traditionally quality forms. Of course, as art and post-modernity march on, we find ourselves with high-value authentic versions of kitsch (from premium Hostess-style cupcakes at neighborhood bakeries to Philippe Starck gnomes).

Photograph by Jeremy Brooks

There are efforts to define and own authenticity from the producer’s side. A consortium of Italian pig farmers from Parma once sued a British supermarket because even though the prosciutto ham they were selling derived from Parma pigs, raised in the region’s landscape, on the requisite diet of curds, it had been sliced in England, and not Parma! The British consumer would have probably accepted it as “real” prosciutto, even if the pigs had been fed in Yorkshire. But if the ham had not been sliced thinly enough, not almost see-through and pink with a