Authenticity is a Con E-Book

Peter York

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The idea of authenticity - deliciously vague and as ubiquitous as Starbucks - has hit the spot in almost every sector of 21st-century life. But can we trust the authentic image of Nigel 'man-of-the-people' Farage, Sarah 'hockey mom' Palin or Gwyneth 'inner life' Paltrow? Are punk bands, distressed denim and rustic furniture really as spontaneous as people seem to think? Is bare-brick Shoreditch just one big authenticity scam? From motivational speakers to PR consultants, music entrepreneurs to devoted foodies, bearded hipsters to earnest YouTubers - and, yes, politicians too - 'authentic' has become the buzzword of our age. But, as Peter York has discovered, its meaning has changed and become corrupted: every advertising agency, micro-connoisseur and charlatan going has re-tooled the language of authenticity for our changing market and it is now practically impossible for us to differentiate between authentic and 'authentic'. Drawing on witty anecdotes and analysing various spheres of everyday life, Peter has set out to uncover the truth behind authenticity - the ultimate con of our generation.

Leseprobe

PROVOCATIONS

AUTHENTICITY IS A CON

PETER YORK

SERIES EDITOR: YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)

You make me feel mighty real

You make me feel mighty real

I feel real

I feel real

I feel real

I feel real

Huh

– Sylvester James, 1978

‘Sincerity – if you can fake that,

you’ve got it made.’

– George Burns, 1952

Contents

Title PageEpigraphIntroduction and acknowledgementsPart I: My journey, their journey or the manufacture of authenticityPart II: The last big thing; the next big thingPart III: Who shall we blame; what can be done?Copyright

Introduction and acknowledgements

THIS IS A series just made for a medium-sized but deeply felt rant. That suits me. I’ve known – for, oh, about ten years, but particularly after the 2008 crash – that I had to write about authenticity. It’s been banging its way out of my head over the last year because I was hearing people talk about authenticity on an ever more constant basis and it made me feel rather shouty. It was partly how they used the word and partly the people who were using it.1 Something was going on. It meant I had to get in touch with my deepest, most elemental feelings about the idea.

Readers who’ve done PPE, or just either Politics or Philosophy, will notice I don’t spend much time on politics. This is because there’s a mass of stuff on political authenticity already and practically none at all on academic philosophy, even though there’s a huge historic philosophical debate and a massive literature about authenticity. I don’t really know my Hobbes from my Heidegger and I’m not going to fake it. Instead, I’ve tried to show where the people boosting the 2014 authenticity vibe are coming from and where I stand about it all.

I’ll take you to my own fountainhead (when anyone references that terrible old nutjob Ayn Rand,2 you know more than you’ll ever need to about them). I’m not exactly transparent – a word with a parallel life to authenticity that keeps rather sinister company – but God knows I’m trying.

I’ve had lots of help. I originally tuned into ‘foodie’ talk from reading Ann Barr and Paul Levy’s marvellous Foodies (The Official Foodie Handbook, 1984), from ‘foodist’ people I’ve met with Henrietta Green, and from Adrian Gill’s clever locutions about how food ideas arrive in our lives at the front of his Sunday Times reviews.

Alice Sherwood convinced me I shouldn’t even touch ‘big P’ philosophy, simply by knowing the territory so well herself when we talked about her own ‘F is for Fake’ project.

Juliette Jackson and Maxine Ostwald filled in a lot of the blanks and Sally-Ann Lasson helped me through a night out in Shoreditch (bare brick and peak beard).

Michael Bracewell talked me through authenticity in popular music and I chewed heavily on Deyan Sudjic’s and Stephen Bayley’s ideas about design (in Stephen’s case, the design of his life too!) And thank you, Iain Dale, for giving me this platform, and my darling editor, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, for suggesting me for it. As for the rest, I’m so not worthy.

1 The Oxford English Dictionary says ‘authentic’ is: ‘The fact or quality of being true or in accordance with fact; veracity; correctness. Also accurate reflection of real-life verisimilitude.’ This is a definition which 2014 users disregard as too boring. They take it to mean true to your feelings; true to some aesthetic; true to some arbitrary decision.

2 Ayn Rand: novelist (1905–82); wrote The Fountainhead (1943); constant inspiration of all Bongo right-wingers.

Part I

My journey, their journey or the manufacture of authenticity

IN LUNA & Curious, a 21st-century shop selling what used to be called ‘notions’ – bits and bobs, little books printed by local presses, accessories and artistic china – on Calvert Avenue, E2 (i.e. Shoreditch), the killer product is ‘honest man’s beard oil’. This is the right place for it, because Shoreditch in late 2014 is top for beards: it’s probably got the highest beard count in the Western world outside a Birmingham mosque. There’ve been a lot of newspaper pieces and blogs recently about ‘peak beard’, the idea that the fashion for beards among young men in the creative industries has peaked, because it was getting altogether too common – too many men had them (and some of them were the wrong men). My friend (cartoonist Sally-Ann Lasson) and I are bare brick- and beard-spotting; the beard flow in the streets of Shoreditch is as good as ever. Mockery in the Telegraph doesn’t seem to have the driven the locals to panic depilation.

On Redchurch Street, the Hostem men’s clothes shop is very dark and disciplined. It sells all those we’re-not-Bond-Street brands – the Japanese ones, the Belgian ones, the ones with the restricted palette of black, white and grey. It’s expensive stuff, and designer in the literal sense that the target market has to be among men trained in that peculiar way of seeing. On the top double-height storey (they own an old mini-block, the outside brick painted dark grey), there’s an amazing floor – herringbone parquet in shining dark grey. We’re peering at it trying to work out what it’s made of.

Give up.

We ask the (bearded) assistant.

It’s stainless steel! Stainless steel specially cut into parquet blocks. Later I check out the cost: it’s about £600 per square metre. You might as well paper the floor in £50 notes.

Over the last twenty years and more, Shoreditch (the media name for the new East End – Hackney, Hoxton, wherever) has gone from artist colony – our own little Montmartre for our own little gang of 1997 Young British Artists (YBAs)3 – to a large commercial theme park. Or, as I described it in GQ:

Hoxton, the fashionable artistic quarter of the East London Borough of Hackney (No. 3 most deprived borough in Britain), is the most invented world imaginable, summoned up from nothing by the voodoo forces of the contemporary art market, clever-end property developers and media in fewer than ten years … it’s Shangri-La, an enclosed world where nobody ever has to grow up.4

For ‘invented’, read inauthentic. Whatever its origins, Shoreditch couldn’t be more calculated, more of a series of planned investments. It’s a developer’s asset class and has developed astonishingly fast. In, say, 1999 there weren’t that many shops, and those that were there were still mostly low-investment, wacky one-offs – oh so very art school.