Authenticity

In his discussion of African tourist art in his essay Authenticity, Repetition and Aesthetics, Steiner correctly locates one issue - newness - within a complex field when he says: “The point is simply that most ‘receivers’ of African art cannot tell the difference between the (falsely constructed) categories of ‘fine’ art and ‘commercial’ art. As one tourist consumer asked me in an Abidjan marketplace: ‘Why should I spend so much money to buy art in the Hôtel Ivoire (art gallery) when I can get stuff that looks exactly the same, for almost nothing, right here?’”

Sometimes it seems that in its compulsive thirst for the new, its tendencies to disassociate present actions from historical precedents and future consequences, Western culture attempts to compensate by forcing other, non-Western cultures into a construct, into immobility, locking them into the past on a cultural level while simultaneously criticising the inability of ‘traditional societies’ to think and act as if they were neo-liberal capitalist structures.

Elsewhere in the same book he points out that various art historians of African art assign arbitrary-but different-cut-off dates for the last date at which authentic African art was produced e.g. 1900, 1940. Some go as far as to argue that there has been no authentic African art for 400 years, since first contact with Europeans and the beginning of colonial expansion. What can be sifted out of such a debate is the nature of the construct which lies embedded in it. It speaks of a traditional (tribal) society which is purely historical and which, up to the date of the ‘authentic’ artefact, was uncontaminated by ‘outside’ influences. And it is the construction of this category of purity and the search for objects alleged to possess it that was historically (and continues to be) at the heart of the Western ethnological enterprise of collecting and labelling in relation to other cultures. Leaving aside the possible uses of cut-off dates in delineating periods of rapid change in production and design of cultural artefacts, any chronological division into before and after denies the continuity of cultural production in a way not experienced by the producing culture.

Up to here I have been considering non-Western cultural objects from an ethnological/anthropological viewpoint where ‘authenticity’ resides in the object and where Western constructions determine all aspects of authenticity, Western experts the criteria to be applied. Of course, the rules governing museum collecting and the artefacts market also have their influence. This means for example that when an ethnologist collates fieldwork with photographs of e.g. masks, those masks become the standard by which everything produced within a defined area is measured, especially if the objects are to be incorporated into a collection. A category is thus established and other objects (less aesthetically pleasing/created after that date) fall outside the ring of light cast by the magic aura - or museum spotlight - of ‘authenticity.’ Thomas sums it up when he says: “Since the serious study of First Nations’ material first began in the late nineteenth century, scholars and connoisseurs have generally paid attention only to pieces they regarded as traditional. New genres of indigenous art were emerging which borrowed colonial media and representational styles to express new Christian beliefs and to record the colonial experience.