Fake Authenticity
john posted in other on July 28th, 2005
from Hermenaut: Whenever “authenticity” is evoked, we are actually in the world of fake authenticity.
Maybe Hermenaut is right, or maybe authenticity just doesn’t mean anything. Things trying to be themselves are fake; things trying to be something they manifestly are not, are faker, especially when they are selling themselves to you. We need a word for the ridiculously fake status gee-gaws that gesture at something else just to infer its status. This Zimmer is mostly made of these:
Note the fake spare wheels. Its just a boring old Lincoln underneath.
An English country garden is trying to be itself, yet you wouldn’t say it could be fake. Maybe if you are a gardener in same town, the hollyhocks and delphiniums are just a bit much. So maybe as soon as a thing is a member of a type - English garden, classic motorcar - it is subject to authenticity. So is it fake if claimed to be authentic? Surely an authentic Stradivarius is The Real Thing, even if it’s used in a Coke commercial. But there’s no point in talking about authenticity if there’s no chance of fakery, and you can’t even think about it if theres no archetype for the thing under discussion. And a fake Strad might be a very fine instrument indeed.
Yet, I don’t want to give up on fighting for the real and rejecting the ersatz. I am certain that shopping malls, Disneyland and City Walk are ersatz environments, though Venturi et al make a case in Learning from Las Vegas for real substance beneath the bright lights. Las Vegas is so fake that it’s something else, in the way that Cony Island was a real place, because of its garish vulgarity. A Hello Dolly of places.
So is it wrong to enjoy a stage set like Las Vegas? Of course not, and anyway its only authenticity is in comparison to its projected image. A Ronald Reagan of places.
An authentic Mississipi roadhouse is just a pile of throw-away buildings in the daylight,
and the House of Blues has good seats, good sound and a very authentic fire sprinkler system. But the HOB is just another ersatz franchise. Its not authentically poor.
Fake or real?
from Sears catalog
(houses could be ordered from Sears in kits)
Its a now a real house, with no hint of its flatcar origins, but it was designed to be a copy of real houses. Once it’s lived in for a few years is it more authentic? Or is it just not-new?
Originally created to be a Monsanto ad for plastic building materials at Disneyland, now demolished. It looks timelessly fake in a whole different way. Real houses were copied from Disney’s creation at the Anaheim park. It was built as a model. Is it authentic fakery now? How about the houses that copied it?
Its chic, because it used to be a factory, but doesn’t feel or smell like it anymore. Somehow transformation makes it authentic, while your average over-priced New York apartment is pedestrian.
Its a discarded warehouse. Definitely authentic, may or may not have any value. The gritty plainness stands in for authenticity, even though it was one of thousands of nearly identical workaday buildings when built.
What is less authentic than Disneyland, with its all-too-perfect facade. The food is still authentically worse than normally bad fast food.
itself an import from abroad, it has a tawdry appeal even as it mimics itself.
So maybe not-new is almost as good as authentic. The new factory, the new urban development, is just not as interesting as the old. There is a quality of designed-ness about new stuff that feels Stalinist in the way it manipulates you, but when things get old, and shopworn chaos creeps in, they become charming. The human mark is upon them. Can this ever happen to mini malls and franchise restaurants and Disneyland? I think not. There is hardly any there there in malls and corporate architecture, and Disney treats its parks like their toilet seats - any mark of character is quickly erased.
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