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