Introduction: The Artifice of Authenticity in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Abstract

Like many people who live a great deal of their professional and social lives online, I used to regard the notion of authenticity as hopelessly old-fashioned, self-delusional even. As James Block remarks in this volume, we now live in the “age of the copy,” an era that, on the face of it, seems to promise a democratization of all forms of culture. As entire libraries of music and literature went online in the early twenty-first century, it seemed to me that only Luddites would fetishize authentic artifacts such as paper books, vinyl albums, and photographic prints. After all, the very word “authenticity” is only a few linguistic paces removed from the word “authoritarian,” and both words conjure up the idea of a single authority who imposes a master narrative of meaning. Rejecting authenticity, then, would seem to be a liberation from both the physical shackles of the real object and from the ideological controls of meaning. Jettisoning the ideas behind authenticity would seem to further the disappearance of the “aura” of the original, something Walter Benjamin famously noted in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”¹