Authenticity in art - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Authenticity in art has a variety of meanings related to different ways in which a work of art

Work of art

A work of art, artwork, art piece, or art object is an aesthetic item or artistic creation.The term "a work of art" can apply to:*an example of fine art, such as a painting or sculpture*a fine work of architecture or landscape design...

or an artistic performance may be considered authentic.
Denis Dutton

Denis Dutton

Denis Dutton was an academic, web entrepreneur and libertarian media commentator/activist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand...

distinguishes between nominal authenticity and expressive authenticity.
The first refers to the correct identification of the author of a work of art, to how closely a performance of a play or piece of music conforms to the author's intention, or to how closely a work of art conforms to an artistic tradition.
The second sense refers to how much the work possesses original or inherent authority, how much sincerity, genuineness of expression, and moral passion the artist or performer puts into the work.

A quite different concern is the authenticity of the experience, which may be impossible to achieve. A modern visitor to a museum may not only see an object in a very different context from that which the artist intended, but may be unable to understand important aspects of the work. The authentic experience may be impossible to recapture.

Authenticity of provenance

Authenticity of provenance means that the origin or authorship of a work of art has been correctly identified.
As Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling

Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...

points out in his 1972 book Sincerity and Authenticity, the question of authenticity of provenance has acquired a profoundly moral dimension. Regardless of the appearance of the object or the quality of workmanship, there is great importance in knowing whether a vase is a genuine Ming vase or just a clever forgery

Art forgery

Art forgery is the creation of works of art which are falsely attributed to other, usually more famous, artists. Art forgery can be extremely lucrative, but modern dating and analysis techniques have made the identification of forged artwork much simpler....

.
This intense interest in authenticity is relatively recent and is largely confined to the western world. In the medieval period, and in countries such as modern Thailand, there was or is little interest in the identity of the artist.

The case of Han van Meegeren

Han van Meegeren

Han van Meegeren , born Henricus Antonius van Meegeren, was a Dutch painter and portraitist, and is considered to be one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century....

is well known. After failing to succeed as an artist in his own right, he turned to creating fake Vermeer paintings. These were accepted as genuine by experts and acclaimed as masterpieces. After being arrested for selling national treasures to the Germans, he caused a sensation when he publicly demonstrated that he was the artist.
To guard against forgeries like this, a certificate of authenticity

Certificate of Authenticity

A certificate of authenticity is a seal or small sticker on a proprietary computer program, t-shirt, jersey, or any other memorabilia or art work, especially in the world of computers and sports, it is commonly a seal on paper authenticating a specific art work which and is made to demonstrate...

may be used to prove that a work of art is authentic. But there is a sizable market in fake certificates.
The financial importance of authenticity may bias collectors to acquiring recent works of art where provenance can more easily be proven, perhaps even by a statement from the artist.
For older works, an increasingly sophisticated array of forensic techniques may be deployed to establish authenticity of provenance.

The philosopher Nelson Goodman

Nelson Goodman

Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...

discusses at length the question raised by Aline B. Saarinen: "If a fake is so that even after the most thorough and trustworthy examination its authenticity is still open to doubt, is it or is it not as satisfactory a work of art as if it were unequivocally genuine?" Goodman concludes that the question is academic, since there must be some way to distinguish a forgery from the original, and once the forgery is known for what it is, that knowledge alters the perception of value.
However, Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler

Arthur Koestler CBE was a Hungarian author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria...

in The Act of Creation
The Act of Creation
The Act of Creation is a 1964 book by Arthur Koestler. It is a study of the processes of discovery, invention, imagination and creativity in humor, science, and the arts...

answers that if a forgery fits into an artist's body of work and produces the same kind of aesthetic pleasure as other works by that artist, there is no reason to exclude it from a museum.

The question of the value of a forgery may be irrelevant to a curator, since they are concerned only with the provenance of the work and not with its artistic merit.
Even for the curator, in many cases provenance is a matter of probabilities rather than a certainty - absolute proof is not possible.
But once a forgery has been exposed, no matter how highly the work was praised when it was thought to be "authentic" there is rarely any interest in evaluating the work on its own merit.

Reproduction is inherent to some forms of art. In Medieval Europe, an artist might create a drawing which was used by another craftsman to create a woodcut

Woodcut

Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...

block. The drawing was usually destroyed in the block-cutting process, and the block was thrown away when it became worn out. The copies printed from the block are all that remain of the work.
In a 1936 essay, Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...

discussed the new media of photography and film, in which the work of art can be reproduced many times with no one version being the authentic "original". He linked this shift from authentic objects to broadly accessible mass media with a transformation in the function of art from ritual to politics.
Modern art may raise new issues of authenticity of provenance. For example, the artist Duane Hanson

Duane Hanson

Duane Hanson was an American artist based in South Florida but born in Minnesota, a sculptor known for his lifecast realistic works of people, cast in various materials, including polyester resin, fibreglass, Bondo and bronze...

instructed the conservators of his 1971 sculpture Sunbather to feel free to replace elements such as the bathing cap or swimsuit if they became faded.
As Julian H. Scaff

Julian H. Scaff

Julian H. Scaff is an artist, filmmaker, and designer from the Sonoran desert in southern Arizona.He received his BA in Film and Video from Pitzer College, his MA in Film Critical Studies from UCLA, and an MFA in Public Art from the Dutch Art Institute ....

points out, the computer and the internet further confuse the issue of authenticity of provenance, since a digital work of art may exist in thousands or millions of identical versions, and in variants where there is no way to determine the original version or even the author.

Cultural authenticity

Authenticity of provenance is concerned with identifying the person who made the work, or at least pinning down the place and time in which the work was made as closely as possible. Cultural authenticity, or authenticity of style or tradition, is concerned with whether a work is a genuine expression of an artistic tradition, even when the author may be anonymous. Interest in this form of authenticity may be associated with a romantic sense of the value of the pure, unadulterated tradition, often linked to nationalistic and possibly racist beliefs.

A work of art may be considered an authentic example of a traditional culture or genre when it conforms to the style, materials, process of creation and other essential attributes of that genre.
Many traditions are thought to be "owned" by an ethnic group, and work in that genre is only considered authentic if it is created by a member of that group. Thus Inuit art

Inuit art

Inuit art refers to artwork produced by Inuit people, that is, the people of the Arctic previously known as Eskimos, a term that is now often considered offensive outside Alaska...

can only be considered authentic if created by an Inuit. This may help to protect the originators of an art tradition from cultural appropriation, but there is a racist aspect to the view as described by Joel Rudinow in his essay Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?

The market for "primitive art" developed in the western world towards the end of the 19th century as explorers or colonialists came into contact with formerly unknown cultural groups in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. These people quickly learned how to incorporate new materials supplied by traders into their art, such as cloth and glass beads, but found that they could not sell these "inauthentic" objects. However, they learned how to manufacture works from local materials that would be considered authentic for sale to the westerners.
This process of creating art that will be considered authentic by western buyers continues to this day. The objects may be designed or modified to give the impression of having popular attributes and provenance, including religious or ritual uses, antiquity and association with royalty.

To distinguish from crude objects made for the tourist trade, many collectors consider that a work is only an authentic example of a traditional genre if it meets certain standards of quality and was made for the original purpose. Dutton gives the example of the Igorot

Igorot

Cordillerans are the people of the Cordillera region, in the Philippines island of Luzon. The word, Igorot is a misnomer term invented by the Spaniards in mockery against the Nortnern Luzon tribes. The word ‘Igorot’ also as coined and applied by the Spaniards means a savage, head-hunting and...

of northern Luzon

Luzon

Luzon is the largest island in the Philippines. It is located in the northernmost region of the archipelago, and is also the name for one of the three primary island groups in the country centered on the Island of Luzon...

who have long created figurines (bulul
Bulul
A Bulul is a carved wooden figure used to guard the rice crop by the Igorot peoples of northern Luzon. The sculptures are highly stylized representations of ancestors, and are thought to gain power from the presence of the ancestral spirit....

) for use in traditional ceremonies, but today produce them primarily for the tourist trade. An Igorot family may purchase a roughly carved bulul from a tourist booth and use it for traditional ceremonies, thus giving authenticity to the work that would not, perhaps, be present otherwise.
Although collectors place greater value on "tribal" masks or sculptures that have been used in an active ritual, it may be impossible to prove whether this is the case. Even if a video shows the mask being worn in a ritual dance, the dance may have been staged for tourists. Yet if the provenance of the mask is proven, if the mask was made by a member of the society using traditional designs and techniques, it is presumably an authentic example of the style or tradition.

It is not always clear what constitutes a style. For example, production of Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...

an stone sculptures is relatively recent, dating to the 1950s. It does not draw on any earlier tradition. However, the sculpture plays an important role in establishing the existence of a uniquely Zimbabwean culture, and the authenticity of this style is strongly emphasized by the government of Zimbabwe despite the difficulty of defining its characteristics.
Navajo

Navajo people

The Navajo of the Southwestern United States are the largest single federally recognized tribe of the United States of America. The Navajo Nation has 300,048 enrolled tribal members. The Navajo Nation constitutes an independent governmental body which manages the Navajo Indian reservation in the...

sand paintings

Sandpainting

Sandpainting is the art of pouring colored sands, powdered pigments from minerals or crystals, and pigments from other natural or synthetic sources onto a surface to make a fixed, or unfixed sand painting...

raise a different issue. The traditional paintings must be destroyed on completion of the ritual in which they are used. However, Navajo artists create sand paintings for sale with slightly modified designs. Can these paintings be considered authentic examples of Navajo art?

Traditions change. In an exploration of the evolution of the art of the Maroon people of French Guiana

French Guiana

French Guiana is an overseas region of France, consisting of a single overseas department located on the northern Atlantic coast of South America. It has borders with two nations, Brazil to the east and south, and Suriname to the west...

, Sally Price

Sally Price

Sally Price is an American anthropologist, best known for her studies of so-called “primitive art” and its place in the imaginaire of Western viewers.- Career :...

shows that contemporary styles have developed through a complex interaction between artists and buyers. The Maroons have a long tradition of artwork, primarily in the form of decoration of everyday objects such as paddles or shutters. This art was purely aesthetic in purpose, with no symbolic meaning. However, European collectors needed to assign symbolism to "native art". Over time, the Maroon artists have come to accept the European semiotic vocabulary and to assign symbolism to their work, which younger artists may believe to be based on ancestral traditions. The artists have also moved into new media and new designs. Their art may still be considered authentic examples of Maroon art, but the art form and the meaning associated with it is new.

Authenticity of performance

With performance arts such as music and theater, both the composer or playwright and the performers are involved in creating an instance of the work. There are some who consider that a performance is only truly authentic if it approximates as closely as possible what the original author would have expected to see and hear. In a historically informed performance

Historically informed performance

Historically informed performance is an approach in the performance of music and theater. Within this approach, the performance adheres to state-of-the-art knowledge of the aesthetic criteria of the period in which the music or theatre work was conceived...

, the actors or musicians will make every effort to achieve this effect by using replicas of historical instruments, studying historical guides to acting and so on. They would consider, for example, that a performance of one of Mozart's piano concertos would be "inauthentic" if played on a modern concert grand piano, an instrument that would have been unknown to the composer.

Others would not take such a rigorous view. For example, they would accept a performance of a play by Shakespeare as authentic even if the female parts were played by women rather than boys, and if the words were spoken with modern pronunciation rather than with the pronunciation of the Elizabethan era

Elizabethan era

The Elizabethan era was the epoch in English history of Queen Elizabeth I's reign . Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history...

, which would be difficult for a modern audience to understand.

Authenticity of expression

Dutton's concept of expressive authenticity is based on the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

alternative definition of "possessing original or inherent authority". In this sense, authenticity is a measure of the degree to which the artist's work is a committed, personal expression rather than derived from other work. It includes concepts of originality, honesty and integrity.
In the case of a musical performance, authenticity of expression may conflict with authenticity of performance. The player is true to their personal musical sense and does not imitate someone else's method of playing. Their performance may thus differ significantly from that of a player attempting to follow the style common at the time the musical work was composed.
Expressive authenticity is related to the technical term authenticity
Authenticity (philosophy)
Authenticity is a technical term in existentialist philosophy, and is also used in the philosophy of art and psychology. In philosophy, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very...

as used in existential philosophy. It has always been thought right to know oneself and to act accordingly, and in existential psychology this form of authenticity is seen as central to mental health.
Prominent artists such as the Abstract Expressionists

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...

, Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced of the Armenian genocide.-Early life:...

, and Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....

have been understood in existentialist terms, as have filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....

and Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and...

.
The greater popularity of performer-based music as opposed to composition-based music is relatively recent. It seems to reflect a growing interest in expressive authenticity, and thus in musicians who have a unique and charismatic style.

The question of whether an artistic work is an authentic expression depends on the artist's background, beliefs and ideals. Andrew Potter

Andrew Potter

Andrew Potter is a Canadian newspaperman and author, best known outside Canada for co-authoring The Rebel Sell, with Joseph Heath.Born in Teulon, Manitoba, Potter attended Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, before earning a BA in Philosophy at McGill University, then MA and Ph.D. degrees in...

cites the example of Avril Lavigne

Avril Lavigne

Avril Ramona Lavigne is a Canadian singer-songwriter. She was born in Belleville, Ontario, but spent most of her youth in the small town of Napanee. By the age of 15, she had appeared on stage with Shania Twain; by 16, she had signed a two-album recording contract with Arista Records worth more...

, a teenage singer from Napanee, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

who burst onto the pop music scene in 2002. She claimed to be a small-town skateboarder, with her background providing the subjects of her songs, and said these songs were her own compositions. These claims of authenticity of expression and of provenance were both challenged. However, her work could have been authentic in expression even if Lavigne had not written it, or authentic in provenance if she had written it but not authentic in expression if the carefully cultivated skater-girl image were false.

Authenticity of expression may thus be linked with authenticity of style or tradition.
Many feel it is not permissible for someone to speak in the voice of another culture or racial background, and that such an expression cannot be authentic.
For example, hip hop

Hip hop

Hip hop is a form of musical expression and artistic culture that originated in African-American and Latino communities during the 1970s in New York City, specifically the Bronx. DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of hip hop culture: MCing, DJing, breaking and graffiti writing...

was originally an art form through which underprivileged minorities in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

protested against their condition. As it has become less of an underground culture, there is debate over whether the spirit of hip hop can survive in a marketable integrated version.
In "Authenticity Within Hip Hop and Other Cultures Threatened with Assimilation," Kembrew McLeod

Kembrew McLeod

Kembrew McLeod is an American journalist, artist, activist, and professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa.He is best known as a performance artist or "media prankster" who filed an application in 1997 to register the phrase "Freedom of Expression" as a trademark in the United...

argues that hip hop culture is threatened with assimilation by a larger, mainstream culture, and that authenticity of expression in this genre is being lost.

Authenticity of experience

A quite different concern is the authenticity of the experience, which may be impossible to achieve. A modern visitor to a museum may not only see an object in a very different context from that which the artist intended, but may be unable to understand important aspects of the work. The authentic experience may be impossible to recapture. A curator may accept this, perhaps attempting to present the works of art in their authentic condition, but accepting that the artificial setting and lighting are legitimate in providing a contemporary experience of the artwork, even if this experience cannot be "authentic".

Dutton discusses the importance of the audience, giving a hypothetical example based on La Scala
La Scala
La Scala , is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala...

, the famous Milan

Milan

Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

opera house. He imagines that the natural audience, informed aficionados of the opera, lose interest and cease to attend, but the performances continue to be given to tourists who have no understanding of the work they are experiencing. In another example, he quotes a Pacific Island dancer saying "Culture? That's what we do for the tourists." In both cases, although the performances may be authentic in the sense of being true to the original, the authenticity of the experience is open to debate.

Postscript

"If it hangs on the wall long enough, it becomes real."

— Elmyr de Hory, art forger (in the Orson Welles

Orson Welles

George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...

ﬁlm F for Fake

F for Fake

F for Fake is the last major film completed by Orson Welles, who directed, co-wrote, and starred in the film. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering...