Authentic feels good and it feels right. It has long been an article of faith on the Internet and elsewhere. But it maybe no more than an attempt to distinguish the rich and powerful from the masses, and in so doing exercise power over those masses. This is the conclusion of an article in the New Statesman:
Yet it is precisely in the marketing of highend brands that we can perceive the key aspect of the modern authenticity mania. Such commodities are sometimes called “aspirational”, because that is now how society has silently agreed to redefine aspiration: as the desire to control more wealth and to own more expensive objects. So what is the implicit bargain when we buy an “authentic” Hermès bag? Or a Hublot watch, a clockwork marvel costing tens of thousands of pounds, which prides itself, like all “luxury” analogue watches, precisely on the amusing superfluity of its engineering? We are being sold the assurance that nimble-fingered workers in a French leather-working atelier or a Swiss horlogerie laboratory have sunk hundreds or thousands of man-hours into its making.
The authenticity of such an aspirational brand’s product boils down to the promise that numberless faceless artisans have lab - oured personally on your behalf. A similar fantasy underlies the ferocious insistence that a coffee shop be “artisanal” and “independent”, the indolent demand for a pre-aged Stratocaster, or the hysterical suspicion that a singer might not have been working hard enough to entertain us. The self-appointed guardians of authenticity, it seems, want desperately to believe that they are at the top of the labour pyramid. In cultural markets that are all too disappointingly accessible to the masses, the authenticity fetish disguises and renders socially acceptable a raw hunger for hierarchy and power.
One striking thing about this authenticity mania is that it is both anti-modern and anti-corporate, the very sources of income and wealth for those elites that crave the status of authenticity the most.
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