Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the topic of authenticity. What is it? Why do we place such value on it? They discuss authenticity in terms of psychology, art, music, religion and more… (part 2 of 3) (originally published 3/21/2024)
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. It is Saturday, so we have another vault episode for you. This is going to be Authenticity Part two. This is part two of three, originally published three twenty one, twenty twenty four. So let's dive right in. I hope you enjoy it.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb, and I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with part two in our series on the concept of authenticity. If you haven't heard part one yet, probably want to go back and check that one out first. But in brief last time, we explored a lot of the different overlapping cultural understandings of authenticity, and we also looked at a psycho ecology paper that tested how well people were able to assess authenticity in others. And the conclusion was that, at least within the scenario tested, which was classroom interactions, we are not nearly as good as we think we are at judging whether other people are really being themselves or whether they are really being authentic. Now, maybe that finding wouldn't be reproduced in other scenarios or using other measures of authenticity, because if you recall from last time, the measure in that study was comparing other evaluations of authenticity with self evaluation. So you have people say themselves like, do you feel like you can be yourself around people? Do your actions reflect your inner thoughts and feelings? Things like that, and then have other people judge that same person, you know, how authentic do you think they're being. But if it's generally true that we're worse at detecting authenticity than we think we are, that has profound implications on everyday life because we make implicit and explicit judgments about authenticity all the time, and we use these judgments to manage our relationships, to decide who we like and who we trust. But also those judgments are they're sort of conceptually contagious throughout the mind, and we end up using assessments of authenticity not just for people, but to determine our feelings about inanimate objects and our feelings in domains outside of personal relationships. And one of the big examples that comes to mind for me is the domain of art and esthetics. We promised last time we'd be getting artsy fartsy today. So here we.
Are, and you know, we might throw in a few references to less artsy creations, some of the things we've talked about on Weird House Cinema before, for example. But yeah, we're going to be talking about authenticity in the arts.
I guess some of this will come down to where you draw the line between art and entertainment, or if you draw a line at all. But one area in which I think people offer and seem especially concerned with authenticity in artistic expression is music. There's actually a book chapter about psychological studies of authenticity from two thousand and six that I've been reading through. This was a chapter by professors Michael H. Kernis and Brian M. Goldman, and I actually am only mentioning it because it uses an epigraph that really struck me. It's a quote from the singer songwriter Leonard Cohen, and the lyric goes, if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am, Oh, take me to the slaughterhouse and I will wait there with the lamb. So this is a lyric from the Leonard Cohen song Stories of the Street, which is a track on his nineteen sixty seven album Songs of Leonard Cohen. Now, I think the authors selected it as an epigraph for this chapter because it invokes the idea of personal authenticity. There's that line if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am? It implies a crisis of authenticity, wondering who am I? Who is the real me? And the second half is the resolution of that conditional if take me to the slaughter house and I will wait there with the lamb. I don't know exactly what that means, and I would resist saying that it decodes to a sentiment that can be plainly expressed, because, like a lot of good poetry, it sort of seems to express an idea or a feeling that is real but is difficult to say directly. Whatever it means. It maybe suggests something about vulnerability, maybe something about the desire to protect or to be protected, and whatever it means, I found it really striking. So I was interested in this quote because it's a song lyric that not only concerns authenticity with the line about I ask you who I am, but in my personal opinion, it illustrates the quality of authenticity and music and Rob you might feel differently. You the listener might feel differently. If so, that's fine. We all have our unique responses to art. But whatever authenticity means in lyrics and musical performance, it feels present to me here. Uh And I think at least part of what authenticity means in music and lyrics is that it feels like the words and the melody express a real genuine feeling in the artist, and that these words are not carelessly selected, but instead are are carefully meaningfully picked because they are the words that best point to that sort of dark, ambiguous, inexpressible feeling underneath.
Yeah, and am and lamb rhyme with each other, and that's undeniable master at work here.
I mean, actually, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff one could get into about how structural constraints like meter and rhyme interact with the expression of ideas. Like if they sort of like force you to choose different words, then you might otherwise, And yet those words must in order for the poem or the song to be good still be true. What does that do to the way your mind works?
Yeah? Yeah, I like it. You know, it works better that we're using the lamb instead of some other animal that you might take to a slaughterhouse, because the lamb also brings in its own symbolism and its own language. So yeah, I like the line. I'm not familiar with the song all that much, but I like the lyric.
I think I've read that it was Cohen talking about an experience where he went by himself to Cuba, and at some point I think he says that he was like at the embassy and they send somebody to talk to him, and they say that his mother is worried about him or something. Anyway, So I mentioned that because to me this does illustrate that quality of authenticity and music. And by contrast, I don't want to single out any particular song or artists to like hate on as the Encyclopedia entry for fake, but I think we can all I'll probably think of a piece of music we've heard and found to have a quality of apparent insincerity which makes the work unpleasant and uninteresting to us. Fill in with your own examples.
Yeah, I'll get into some examples, not of like outright like a fakery or anything here in a bit, but I think that some of the most interesting examples are examples that are kind of in that middle ground where either it is divided people about the artist's potential sincerity and authenticity, or it has been something that you know that won individually and subjectively wrestles with like do I like this, Do I believe this artist? Other people seem to believe them, but I'm not sure I do, and so forth.
Yeah, yeah, well, that's interesting that you know audiences can be divided in that way, because I mean, it's a truism that everybody has their own subjective reaction to art. But I think you can also see some very stark trends in the way people relate, especially to authenticity and music, because I would say for some of us, the relationship between musical expression and authenticity maybe only enters the mind every now and then, maybe when we hear something we find especially moving and sincere seeming or especially false. But for other people, it's like a clear, ever present, front of mind element of our taste in music, maybe even the single most important factor. And I'm curious, like what makes that difference and in the people for whom it is front of mind in their esthetics.
Why, speaking of Leonard Cohen, your inclusion of this quote kind of sending down a rabbit hole of reading some other tidbits from interviews with Leonard Cohen and sort of refreshing myself about his career. But I ran across this one quote from an Alan Twigg interview with Cohen, and I want to read it here. Cohen says, quote, the question is who am I? So we invent a self, a personality, We sustain it, we create rules for it. When you stop asking those questions in those moments of grace. As soon as the question is not asked and the dilemma is dissolved or abandoned, then the true self or absolute self rushes in. That's our real nourishment.
That's interesting in that it connects to what you were saying in the last episode about the more you sort of examine your own authenticity, the harder it can be to let it flow.
Yeah. Yeah, And I don't know, ye, I feel like if I'm questioning the authenticity of a work of music or a film or whatever kind of art I'm engaging with, like, I'm probably not that engaged with the art, you know. Yeah, I'm caught up in a bunch of other nonsense about the art, and I'm certainly not experiencing it in the way that the artist probably intended me to do, unless, of course, that is the artist's intent that they are challenging authenticity or something to that effect.
That's a really good point. It's like, when we do you really get into evaluating whether something is authentic or not, it does make you have to like step back from the experience of it. I assume a desire for perceived authenticity in the expression of musical artists is to some degree always present, But I was thinking about how it seemed especially important to me when I was a teenager. Like when I was a teenager, the worst thing a musical artist could be was fake, contrived pandering. What did this mean to me? I don't know exactly. I mean, I could think of specific artists like very I don't know, like very commercial rock bands or something that I would think of as very fake and seemingly and sincere.
Uh you know.
I don't know on what basis I was deciding that, But I don't feel the same urge to like seek raw authenticity and root out fakeness and music that I once did, though obviously I still don't like feeling like an artist is treating me with contempt, But like, why is it that as And I think maybe I'm not a loan in this, Like why is it that as a teenager you're especially tuned into this meta media quality of authenticity as opposed to more just sort of like in the work or in the song qualities of a piece of art.
That's interesting, and I think we might get into some of that in a bit because it makes me think of like the hyper social aspects of the teenager brain, you know that we've touched on before on the show. Yeah, I suppose it's it's kind of a weird area to get into because, you know, thinking again about artists at particular times in their careers where they seem to divide their audience. It's interesting how two different musical artists can take on a persona to be received in wildly and it can be received in wildly different ways. And the way they're received for these persona personas or changes in their style may also differ over time. So I think one of the like the main examples that comes to mind is the whole And this is not something certainly I was not around to experience this in real time, but you read about it and hear about it in retrospectives. But Bob Dylan going electric in nineteen sixty.
Five, people allegedly shouting Judas at him. I don't know if that really happened, but that's what I recall reading about it. So, yeah, he had recorded like acoustic folk albums and then it suddenly was playing with an electric guitar and a full band. And some people didn't like that. They saw that not just as a change in style that well, yeah, you know, artists go through different kind of periods. It was like that was a betrayal. He was no longer what I signed up for.
Yeah, and it's it can feel kind of silly looking back on it, because from our point of view, like we know everything that came after that shift, like you know, put out a lot of great material, great albums, and other changes in style and explorations of different styles and ideas. But he remained Bob Dylan throughout all of it. And you know, some of it is maybe not everybody's favorite, but some of it's pretty great.
I certainly think so.
Now of course that in that example, you have like a shift in sound that I think would largely be reflected. You know, it's not like he would he would okay, he would say, all right, after one album, I'm gonna put the guitar away. But you do have other artists who have kind of like a single album that seems to be an outlier, It seems to be like an exploration of something different than is maybe not well received by fans. And I think one example that came to mind on this front is Neil Young's nineteen eighty three album Trance.
This was actually within a stretch of Neil Young albums where he was like changing genre every album. So during this period, you know, Neil Young, he had sort of he had worked in folk, he had worked also in heavy electric rock. He'd done both. But he in the eighties he released a country album, a blues album with like Horns, a rockabilly album called Everybody's Rockin', and then this I'm not necessarily saying them in the correct order, but then also this electronic album, which is probably the weirdest of all of them.
Yeah, he has he uses a robotic voice on some of these tracks, and I've read that this was not well received at the time by some fans, but I don't know. I like some of the roboty songs on this particular album.
Yeah, you have to be in the right mindset to receive it, especially with songs like Computer Cowboy, But yeah, I think there's stuff to appreciate there.
Now a couple of examples that I want to bring up. These are ones that definitely occurred during my teenage years, so you know, getting into that idea of being like hypersensitive to perceived in authenticity. So one that comes to mind is David Bowie exploring a more experimental industrial sound on his album Outside in nineteen ninety five.
So were there people who were like that, there is a real David Bowie and this is not it.
It is my understanding that, like at the time, some of the older David Bowie fans were not crazy about it and their line of thought. I was like, oh, I don't want to go see him in a concert if he's going to be doing this MTV material, you know, it's like I want to hear the hits, you know, which I guess is always the case with artists putting out new material and trying new things. But yeah, this was more of an industrial sound. It was like, I think right after this album he ends up touring with nine inch Nails. So at the time, I like, I bought the album like I did as as the television commanded me, and I liked and I guess I still I don't really listen to this album anymore, but I remember it having some tracks that I dug. But at the same time, like some of that dialogue was in my head about I wasn't thinking of it in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity or fakery even or even really getting deep into like David Bowie's personas, but it was. But on some level I was wondering, like is this is this something he's doing just to remain popular or is this his heart? You know, is his Is he legitimately exploring new sound and trying new things? And I think it's it's my understanding now it is the latter. Like he he is an artist that was continually reinventing himself and trying new things, and this was just a phase of that. And you know, he stuck with this sound for I think another album and then he tried other things.
That is interesting. So I have no real familiarity with Bowie's nineties output, so I don't really know anything about this, but uh, yeah, that an artist as a chameleon, like as as David Bowie, and you know, with all this history of playing these different explicitly different characters, you know, with different with names named characters, uh, and engaging in these different styles, that there would it's he would hit some point that people would say, Okay, now this one is not for real, that's fake. Yeah, and that that would have to suggest something about like the broader the way that that genre or what he's doing and it is received in the broader marketplace, like what the marketplace thought about industrial music or something.
Yeah. Yeah. Because another example that comes to mind, and this is not a major moment in music history or anything, but it's one that stood out to me because again I was a teenager at the time, and that was that the band Danzig suddenly it went industrial in nineteen ninety six as well, So that's what a year after outside and that one I remember as being a lot more jarring. I'm certainly looking back on it like it is. It is a rather starch departure from the previous material and seems like maybe it's a little less authentic. I don't know. I'm sure Danzig fans will disagree or agree on this. I have no point of reference here, but you know, this kind of thing keeps happening, like the most recent one, and I am not super well informed on all the ins and outs of this story, but you know, it made huge headlines that Beyonce was going to put out a country album, and it seems like that probably stirred up some of the same discussions, like, Beyonce do a country album? Can someone who has not done country music album before do a country album? Of course they can. We just ran across some other examples of people doing the same thing. But yeah, anytime an artist shifts and try something new, takes on a new persona, et cetera, it raises these questions.
I don't really know anything about this example either, except I saw some kind of headline about her maybe claiming that it was not actually a country album.
I don't know, Yeah, but you know, artists engage in the sort of shift all the time. And it also it reminds me a bit of our discussion about recipes in the past. You know, whatever we now think of as the standard recipe was at some point a shift. And likewise, I mean, speaking of industrial music, one of the big industrial mainstays out. There has has has always been Ministry. Ministry started out as a synthpop group. If you go back to their first album, it is it's very I mean, you know, you can still you can still feel the Ministry in the album, but it's a different sound entirely, and that was just, you know, part of this particular groups evolution. And you know, it doesn't mean it's inauthentic, it's just where they were at that point in time. But again, I guess in general, I'm willing to give most artists the benefit of the doubt on these shifts and changes, though I'm sure there are some examples that are that are maybe a little more heavily slanted in the direction of inauthenticity. But you know, it's not as fun to discuss those and throw a lot of criticism at bands and performers for trying new things. However, there was that one Garth Brooks album, as I remember, where he took on a different persona and did non country music.
Chris Gaines.
Chris Gaines. Yeah, this this was not well received, as I recall, was it not? I don't think it was. I don't think he came back to the persona either. But again, this is an area that I know even less about. So Garth brook fans, you know, write in I guess and we'll we can just we can hash this out.
How surprised are people going to be when they find out that Garth Brooks is actually also one of the guys in slip.
Knot I have nasan you'd never know.
But I wanted to briefly come back to the question of why it is that music might feel like, of all the genres of art out there, why music would be especially subject to authenticity concerns like why, you know, teenagers are really concerned about whether this singer songwriter is authentic as opposed to I don't know, you know, like painters or something. And I obviously there could be a lot of explanations here, but I kind of wonder if it has to do with the fact that music is the art form most likely to be experienced in an involuntary way. So, for example, you will rarely, if ever, be forced to look at a painting or watch a film. You know, there might be social pressure to go see a movie with your friends that you're not really interested in, or something like that. Some weird circumstance. But generally you can look at what you want, and if you don't like what you're looking at, you can, like you know, direct your attention elsewhere, or even shut your eyes unless you have the aid of some kind of technology like you know, headphones or something which are not appropriate to use in many, say, social or work scenarios. You cannot practically shut your ears off to music the way that you can shut your eyes or avert your eyes from a painting. And if music is audible in the place where you are, you're gonna hear it. Technically, I guess this would be true of any sound based art form because of the nature of our bodies. But generally that's going to mean music. So music is like especially difficult to tune out if we don't like it, And I wonder if that makes us especially sensitive to what we would think of as artistic deficiencies in it. And then on top of that, a lot of music has a has a linguistic element, unlike a lot of other art forms. Because there are words in most popular music, there is increased opportunity to scrutinize what a song is saying and evaluate it for sincerity or truth.
Yeah. Yeah. Though again, just because the song is annoying doesn't mean it's not authentic. Right, Like I am not a huge you know, no judgment if you're a fan of this song, but you know the the smash Mouth song, what is the smash Done.
All Star, I mean the all Stark.
That that song. I'm not a fan, but I do get it earwormed in my head every now and then, and it's it's annoying. But I don't think I would argue that that band was being inauthentic in crafting and performing this track, But I just it was certainly not my thing. I think another thing about to keep in mind about all this too is we have to bear in mind media consumption. So like when I think back on the music that I was exposed to in high school, like most of it was MTV related content, and it's because the TV was always on and MTV was one of the channels that you could you would frequently go to, and like, not watching the TV just did not feel like an option. It was just you know, it was like the weather, it was like the ocean. You just you engaged with it. It was just part of your environment. And I think it is like that to varying degrees for a lot of folks today. I mean, there are people who still consume television like that, or even if you're not watching television, perhaps you're consuming various advertisements in the same way. So some of these songs or elements, certainly there have been more than a few commercials that have the air of inauthenticity about them, and you may be exposed to those over and over again.
Okay, Rob, I think it is time we must bring Orson Wells into the picture.
That's right, Yeah, getting even more into this idea of fakeness, of inauthicity to the point where it is an outright fake, which is not something we've really been leveling at any of these artists we've discussed here, because you know, this is more of a you could, if you were feeling particularly harsh, you might say, oh, well, this this change, this was fake, this album was fake. But it wasn't wasn't really fake. It was an actual fraud. But yeah, what we're going to talk about next does get into that territory. So, knowing that we're going to be talking about authenticity in preparation for these episodes, I decided to finally check out Orson Well's nineteen seventy three film F for Fake, a film that is sometimes described as a docudrama, other times a film essay. And I guess I feel like maybe film essay is a little more appropriate. It is because it's not just like a straight up documentary.
No.
I would say film essay is perfect because it is a combination performance and a meditation on themes with the aid of visuals and sound, and also a documenting of certain real life characters and events.
Yeah, and it's also kind of like being cornered by Orson Wells, probably like in a bar or a restaurant and he's just talking at you for a long time, and it's it's and it's remarkable, and he's very charismatic, and you were glad that you have been cornered by such an interesting man. Yeah.
Ah, the French known to do magic tricks, and he shows you some.
I was looking up a little bit about how this film was received, and Roger Ebert in his review described it as a film spun out of next to nothing, and he included this quote, Orson Wells can make better movies than most directors. With one hand tied behind his back, his problem, of course, is that for thirty five years the hand has remained tied.
That's good.
Yeah, I don't know if I'm not as enough as an expert on Wells's film of his filmography had really comment on that. But esteem for this particular film has grown quite a bit since its initial release, where I think it was kind of polarizing. Some people thought it was brilliant, others thought it was comprehensible. Ebert gave it three stars in seventy seven.
It's been a long time since I've seen it, but I remember quite liking it. My friend Ben showed it to me years and years ago, and yeah, I was my attention was wrapped.
Yeah. So, in short, it's a Wells hosted essentially, we'll say documentary just for ease of conversation here about famed painter and art forger Elmir de Lori, which sites and features interviews with a man who wrote a book about Elmir, Clifford Irving, a man who, in turn, after his interview segments were shot for this documentary, but prior to the completion of the film, turned out to have allegedly written a hoax biography of Howard Hughes.
This was a hoax autobiography right, like it was autobiography, yes, claiming to be by Howard Hughes.
Yeah, based on his his handwriting and so forth. You know, a huge, huge scandal. So these are the initial two fingers of the cat's cradle that Wells constructs from here on out in this film on fakery, on authenticity. And he also freely injects his own story into all of the citing early exaggerations of his own credentials that allowed him to rise to the top in show business I think, he adds, and I've been plummeting ever since. He also brings up the nineteen thirty eight War of the World's radio fiasco, which of course, you know, apparently convinced a number of people that it was actually happening. And he goes on to indulge in some overt forgery in at least the last portion of the film, and then points out the forgery and invites us all to think about it.
So sort of like we've been doing in this series, he invites you to think about what is authenticity. We use this concept, but do we understand what it means? What is real and what is fake? And why do we care.
Yeah, Like, what's the difference between a masterpiece and a masterful fake? Is almost any story, indeed some kind of a lie a lie in Picasso's words, as cited by by Wells, here is something that makes us realize the truth is that true? Is that is that a dependable statement? Can an authentic artist create a fake? Can a hoax? Or create where I suppose recreate a masterpiece? You know, there are a lot of ins and outs to this when you start swirling it around in your negrony. That was his favorite drink by the way, Oh yeah, So these are these are not really questions meant to be conclusively answered, And indeed, I think we'll find that it all depends very largely on the context of an individual example. So, for instance, what sort of lie is is a given story based upon Is it based on a malicious lie, a hateful lie, a well meaning lie, a mere exaggeration or dramatization. There's so much room for variation here, and you still encounter various examples in just sort of like popular discourse about about individuals, about performances, about you know, performance works, where someone will say was this authentic? Is this was part of this made up? And so forth.
I think the difference between fiction and a lie is the knowing consent of the audience in advance, and in most cases it's interesting that this is established through entirely meta textual means. Like you can have a printed novel in which no part of the text makes clear that the events described did not actually happen, and yet somehow we all still know. It's like from you know, surrounding clues in the culture, like what section of the bookstore or library you'd find the book in, how other people talk about the book, how it's advertised, and so forth. Meanwhile, if you read something that you understand to be a true account of events that happened in reality, say an autobiography of Howard Hughes or something, and then you discover that the events described are fictional or that the author is not who they claim to be, I think most of us would feel very frustrated and betrayed by this, unless, that is, we know in advance that we're going to be told lies. And here I think back to an example that's come up on the podcast a number of times in the past year or so. I'm very interested in the autobiography of the sixteenth century Italian sculptor Benvenudo Cillini. We've told a number of stories about him. We talked about him in the episode about Diamonds, where we were talking about his claims that someone tried to poison him with a diamond in his food. And so, you know Cillini, like, he writes this autobiography which purports to be the true story of his life, and yet I am certain that it contains lots of exaggerations and even outright lies, and yet I'm still interested in reading it. And I think it's that I think it's that I'm okay with that because I already know that we don't want to find out after reading something that what we read isn't true. We'd like to know beforehand. Like going into a lie knowing in advance feels like a whimsical adventure. But finding out you've been told to lie after you believed it makes you feel like a fool.
Yeah. Absolutely, And of course, over the course of time, something that is a fraud, that is fooling people, it can't eventually find new life after the factor. Someone's like, we know this is not a fraud now, and now perhaps we can appreciate it as a work of fiction, but that transition is not guaranteed and certainly doesn't occur every time. But in this discussion of like the difference between fiction and lies, between fantasy and lies, reminds me of our discussions in the Weird House episode on the movie The Never Ending Story based on Michael DA's novel, and in the novel especially indicates into the idea of the denizens of Fantasia or fantastica being, you know, creatures a pure fantasy and that have been dreamed into existence by humans. But if they travel through then nothing. They are not destroyed. They are reborn in our world, but they are reborn as lies. So that is the way he sort of imagined the relationship between lies and fantasy, between lies and fiction, is that the lie is kind of the same energy, but it is twisted into this form that does not give us hope, does not give us escape. It takes this cruel form that is a part of the overtly unimaginative and cruel, mundane world. In citing a book like The Neverding Store, of course, we're also admitting that, yeah, that we're dealing with highly subjective territory here. Now one point that is hit upon in f for fake is that between the masterful fraud and the masterpiece. It's a belief in authenticity that makes all the difference monetarily certainly, and Wells dwells on this somewhat, but also in turn of the of esteem that is given to a particular art work. Authenticity can therefore be this kind of illusion. It's only as real as our belief in it.
Yeah, A belief in the power of authenticity and a work of art is kind of like belief in the value of money. Like it is very real if people believe in it, and thus, like a whole culture can function on top of it. But if people don't believe money is valuable, then it ceases being useful. And I think you could say that the same is true in some ways about qualities of art.
Yeah, yeah, And that's one of the reasons it can be so hurtful and it can be so disappointing to find out that something that you were invested in, that you found beautiful, that you had this reaction too, is in fact not one hundred percent of what you thought it was. And there are variations on that theme, you know, throughout our appreciation of all sorts of works of art and music and so forth. Yeah, now, speaking of this, there are it is worth noting there are no worthy cases of work and art collections that turned out to be fakes. These still pop up. But there's also the reverse. There are works previously judged to be fakes, but then upon closer scrutiny or you know, new information, or someone else takes a look at him, they turn out to be authentic. So it's interesting how, at least at times this can go back and forth.
Was this the case with da Vinci's Lady with Ermine? I feel like I was reading about that not too long ago, that, or at least for a while, there were questions about who had really painted it, or was it a true da Vinci, But I think now it is largely thought to be.
I'm not sure because I wasn't reading about that particular painting in reference to this, but there have been various works like that have had this story where it's dismissed as a fake, maybe a very good fake, but then we come back and we realized that it's not the case. And then it's also worth noting that I think in different artistic traditions there just there's a different relationship with copying master works from the past, to the extent that they may be copied as especially as a learning method for artists and so forth.
Well, that actually connects to something that I wanted to talk about today with respect to authenticity in art. I wanted to talk about a famous essay in the history of art criticism by the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin called the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This was published in nineteen thirty five, and the core claim of Benjamin's argument in this essay is that what he calls mechanical reproduction, meaning techniques such as lithography, photography, and film, have fundamentally changed the way art functions within culture and changed what art means to us. And this essay brings in a lot of different ideas, including religious ideas and political ones. Walter Benjamin was a Jewish German writing this at the time of the early years of the Third Reich, and he was concerned with ways that technology could change, how art would be used for propaganda and mass manipulation and all kinds of stuff like that. I'm going to get less into the political implications here, so I can't cover everything in this essay, but I did want to focus on his ideas related to authenticity. So Benjamin talks about how like you were mentioning a minute ago. Rob art has always been, in principle reproducible to some extent. A work of art made by a person, such as a painting or a sculpture, or a performance of a song or a dance, can always be imitated and copied to some extent by another person. But a copy made by mere imitation is never exact. It can only strive to be similar by degree, and it is difficult and laborious to reproduce. But a big part of the training of artists in century past used to be just trying to reproduce other works of art by artists who came before. And one thing I would add is that I think a lot of creative people even today, discover their own original creative genius first by trying to copy things. Trying to copy things when they're young, and in the laborious process of making manual copies of somebody else's work of art. Because they can't make a perfect copy, they end up diverging from the original out of necessity. Because they can't do it, and then in this divergence start expressing their own unique style, which then develops into what that person will use when creating original works of their own.
Yeah. Yeah, And we see this throughout history, sometimes in like rigorous art training and different cultures, but even today, like there's the sort of the various examples of this, some more current, but some also going back several decades where what begins as an exercise in fan fiction becomes either the either the work in and of itself or sort of the ideas that spring out of that work become a new creation, something that is wholly original to a given author or you know, a creator of some sort.
Yeah, totally. So, I think imitation is not something that you know, should be should be shunned within art. It's like a necessary part of the development of artistic styles and has been, you know, all throughout history. But one of the things is that while we've always been able to imitate other people's performances and artworks, over the centuries, gradually higher fidelity techniques for mechanically reproducing works of art have come online. So you you know, might originally have things like the crude ability to stamp coins. In the ancient world, you could reproduce a crude design over and over on coins. Later you get wood cut, printing, lithography, and final in the nineteenth century, the photograph in the motion picture, and early In this essay, though this wasn't quite yet true at the time, Benjamin quotes the French poet Paul Valerie making a striking prediction about the future of image and sound reproduction technology. So Valerie says this is in translation, just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign whoa wow, whoa reading. That made me sit back, because obviously that is the world we live in now. I mean, it's we don't stop to appreciate it often. But how historically strange it is that we can we can summon a photograph of almost anything that has been photographed, just by making a few gestures with the hand.
Yeah, it is crazy, like to the point where it feels like we are being deprived of something when we can't summon such an image, when there is an image that is or you know, artwork that is lost. I feel this way just talking about films, like, so much in the cinematic canon is available to us now, and in many cases it has been remastered, has been made widely available digitally or otherwise, and yet there are plenty of exceptions to this, films that haven't been restored, that aren't as widely available, or in some cases, films that have been lost. And there is something just kind of crazy about that, you know, given how much is out there and how much we have to realize that there are works that are just gone to history and we'll never be able to bring them back.
Yeah. So obviously this gets us really thinking about, you know, the preservation of art and our access to it and what it means when we're not able to see something we want. But also it I think should make us think about how this kind of access and this kind of relationship to images of art, and this would include all forms of art. I mean, we're talking especially about visual art, but this would include you know, recordings of musical performances, recordings of plays, and other types of physical performances of sculptures. Imagery of sculpture is films. Of course, we should think about how this kind of media, technologically mediated access to these works of art changes the way we experience them and what they mean to us. So in this essay, Benjamin argues that when we interact with a mechanically reproduced copy of a work of art, for example, a photographic print of a painting, just so you can imagine something specific in your mind, let's say the Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt, I in fact copied and pasted an image of this painting into our outline here, So let that marinate, given what we're talking about. But so when we access, say a photographic print of a painting like this, we may be deceived into thinking that we are looking at the painting, but we're not. Even though, but by some measures, you could argue that the photograph is a quote perfect reproduction, not subject to like the little variations and deficiencies that would emerge if a skilled forger tried to paint a copy of it by hand. There also there are still differences. First of all, though we think of photographic reproduction as perfect, there are things that can't really be captured very well in a photo, such as the three dimensionality of some paintings, Like some paintings really kind of come off the canvas, and you know, the texture of the brushstrokes and the pile up of the painting and stuff can cast little shadows and so forth. So there's that. There's how the painting interacts with light in the room, how it changes over time, etc. However, even if we had a machine to make three dimensionally chemically exact physical copies of painting, Benjamin says, there would still be a difference, because he writes, quote, even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element, its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years, as well as the various changes in its ownership. So, by virtue of the fact that a physical work of art, the original is a single object, it has a history associated with it that is not true of the history of the copies. Now we might well think, well, when I look at a painting, I don't really care if it's the physically original copy. I don't really care whether the painter's hands touched it. I don't care who owned this physical artifact or where it was kept at what time. That's not interesting information to me. And maybe you don't care about that. That's something maybe I don't think about all that often when I google an image of a painting. But it's possible that the fact that we don't care about those things is a result of existing in a world where our response to art has been conditioned by ubiquitous mechanical reproduction.
And it's interesting to compare these experiences of encountering art in person and seeing it online and so forth. Like I can think of examples from my my on my own part, they went both ways. Like, for instance, I first saw the paintings of Irving Norman in person, and I was really captivated by just like they're they're huge, and like it's a in you're you're there, you're in this work's presence, and you just kind of feel like you're falling into it and you get to sort of walk back and forth checking out little details of it, and like That's one of the great experiences of seeing a work of art in person is you get to have that prolonged multisensory experience with the piece. I mean, you know, maybe you know you shouldn't touch it, don't go and lick it or anything. But still like there are various things going on, like even things not directly tied to the painting, like just hearing, like the you know, the echoes in the museum and so forth. And yet there are other works like I had long been a fan of this particular work by Arnold Buchlan, Isle of the Dead. There are various versions of this that he paint. Is very iconic painting that is often referenced in film of this strange dark island that is not like the symbolism is is harder to piece apart like it does it's not just an island. It looks like a skull, but it is very captivating and does seem to have this grim darkness to it. And yet when I saw one of these versions that had been painted by the artist in person at the met years back, I was initially disappointed because you know, this didn't necessarily have a lot to do with the painting itself, but like, you know, the lighting in the room for some reason was it's very dark work just in terms of just like the black pigment, and the light was catching it in a weird way. And I think like there were a lot of people moving through that space at the time, so I didn't like feel like it was in its presence and so forth. So there are all these different factors that can influence the way that we encounter a piece online versus in person. Though at the end of the day, like when you encounter it online, how much time are we really giving that work before we click on to the next thing, Whereas if you're in the room with it, unless you're just speeding through the museum, you've got to give it some time. You've got to like breathe with it for a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's true, and it's absolutely right what you're saying that, like just little variations in the physical experience in the room of seeing an artwork can change the way you really to it. But you know, there's another way that I think the mechanical reproduction has affected your relationship to these works of art, which is that you had seen them before you saw them that's right.
Yeah, So the pure impact of Island Dead was lost on me because I knew exactly what to expect, and I was looking for all of these things, and I had an experience already in mind. And clearly that wasn't the artist's intent that we would go into it having seen the image before before we saw the image.
So here's where we get to the idea of authenticity as a concept in art. For Walter Benjamin, a work of art possesses an authenticity that is related to its physical uniqueness and history as an object or I guess also as like a performance. So an original painting or sculpture, or a certain performance of a piece of music or a play are all physically unique objects or situations, and in their original form, they have this authenticity that cannot be reproduced, that is, their original uniqueness in form. By mass producing a photographic or filmed copy of a work of art or performance, the technical reproduction is stripped of that physical and situational authenticity and then propagated in this copied format. And the sum of the qualities that are lost when a work of art is mechanically reproduced in this way is what Benjamin refers to as the aura of the original, the aau r A. The aura is all of this stuff about the physically unique original that does not get carried over in mechanical copies. So one commonly cited example of how the ara affects the experience of art is by a change in the location of the experience. Benjamin writes, quote the cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art. The choral production performed in an auditorium or in the open air resounds in the drawing room. And you know, this makes me think of something with regard to movies. Actually, even though cinema is kind of different, because cinema is an art form explicitly designed with mechanical reproduction in mind. You know, you know when you make a movie that there are going to be print copies of it that will be taken all over and shown in theaters all over the land. Nevertheless, I can recall interviews I've watched and read with multiple different film directors expressing a common sentiment, which is heartfelt anguish at the idea of somebody watching one of their movies on a phone. Changing the venue and format of viewing fundamentally alters what the director meant for the audience to experience. So if you made a movie thinking people would be seeing it in a movie theater, and then they're watching it on a phone, it may be a faithful reproduction, pretty high fidelity visuals and sound of the film you made, but it's not what you had in mind. It's a different thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A number of directors have said this in recent years, and you also hear fans say this. I mean I've said this as well, Like I come back from seeing Dune Part two and I say, this is a movie you need to see on the big screen. Now, do I think it should only be seen on the big screen. No, I'm going to watch it on a smaller screen at some point. That's probably gonna be my second viewing. I might even watch parts of it on a phone, and that's my choice, you know. So, I think we sometimes it can get a little overblown and folks can get a little carried away with it. But I do think Yeah, we've talked about this in reference to particular films on Weird House before. For instance, when we talked about Pirana Mandir, the the Indian horror movie and we talked about like the intended not only the intended scope of the picture, but sort of like the intended viewing experience. That this was not something they didn't make this film thinking about, you know, two podcasters watching it by themselves in their individual households, you know, on their laptop around their TV. Now, this is something lots of people were going to go to a movie theater to enjoy together, find different things to enjoy in the film, depending on how old they were and so forth, and what their tastes were, and it was going to be you know, like kind of a party, according to what I read about this film's original release.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true that some films are made with a large viewing audience all gathered together and experiencing it at the same time in mind. But at least with the example of film, you could say that film is something that is made with the understanding initially that it's going to be it's going to be copied and viewed in different contexts and stuff. You know that the creators have to understand that will happen over time.
You know.
You got to wonder with like some of these older works of art, like what the creator might have imagined or not even just what the creator imagined, just like whether it was in the creator's mind or not. The changes, the kind of unexpected changes that come in how people experience these works of art. So Benjamin says that as a result of the necessary stripping of aura and authenticity from a work of art in the process of mechanical mechanical reproduction, you know, it not only affects how that copy of the art is experienced directly, it like changes our relationship to art in general. It changes how we see what art is. So a culture of mechanical reproduction sort of undermines the authority and spiritual power of a work of art by, in Benjamin's words, detaching it from tradition. And he develops this idea of art tradition as historically intertwined with religious traditions. For example, he talks about how a lot of art emerged in deep history from religious practices and ritual paintings and sculpture depicted the gods or legendary heroes or mythic encounters. Music was sung in worship of the gods, and in this tradition, religious art was thought to have a value that was independent of its value as an object to be perceived and admired by an audience. This traditional religious value of art is what he calls its cult value. And I'll read a quote from the essay here. Benjamin Writ's quote, artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve as a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits. Today, the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella. Certain madonnas remain covered nearly all year round. Certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on the ground level. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. Now one little note here in the specific example of cave art, I think we should be clear that we don't know exactly what its function was, and we should be careful about speculating too much there. But certainly with the later art forms he mentions like occurring within written history. You know, the sculptures and the statues he cites. We know that lots of them were thought to be important because of their inherent existence and not just because people would look at them.
That's a great point. I mean this also applies to various ancient, prehistoric examples of art that that for the most part, are best viewed from an aerial vehicle, you know. Yeah, Like, it's not necessarily that that that it's not that people were going to view it. And again we get into the same problem of maybe not knowing exactly what the intent was or or how they imagined a viewer of this piece, be it human or divine.
You're talking about like the the Nasca designs and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's an excellent example the things that like could not be viewed in their total form by a person at the time.
But does that mean it had to have been aliens because that you had to have somebody flying overhead to see it.
No, not necessarily, No, I don't think it means it had to be aliens. At all, it probably means that there was some value of this work of art other than a person being able to see the whole thing at once. So considering this, Benjamin talks about how over time, artistic culture emerged that separated these works of art, these items from their cult value by removing them from their original context and putting them in museums and galleries and sending them traveling around the world and mobile exhibitions, or just by having people observe them in their original place but without the original ritual context. And this shift from what Benjamin calls cult value to exhibition value seems to the author here to decrease the power and authority of the artwork, but it also creates a culture with a different idea of what art is for and what makes a piece of art valuable and important. And you might imagine all kinds of examples of how this would change the way people evaluate and relate to art when culture tells you that this is a thing you go to a museum and look at and appreciate as an expression of emotion and the display of technical artistic skill, rather than a thing that maybe lives in a temple and somehow depicts channels or honors a god or a divine idea, even if nobody's there to look at it. And so I think Benjamin's idea is that mechanical reproduction causes a sort of continuous along the spectrum, a similar shift in the value of art, even further away from the traditional cult value of art, which is somehow related to the authenticity of an artwork, according again to Benjamin's definition of authenticity being like the original uniqueness of the art work, and divorces art further from its its history, its tradition of cult value, divorces it from the aura, and it causes a devaluation of the art itself and changes its meaning. It becomes something else, something more like a product. Now you could acknowledge, as I think Benjamin did, that there could be both good and bad consequences that arise from changing the meaning of art through mechanic reproduction. Just one thing that comes to my mind. I don't know that this is how it works, but I wonder if by increasing accessibility of art through mechanical reproduction and sort of if Benjamin's theory is correct, removing it from its traditional sort of power and cult value, maybe that helps also broaden ones appreciation for art that is from outside your own cultural or religious tradition. I'm not sure it works that way, but that's possible, so you can see good sides as well.
Yeah, I mean not everybody can travel to see these various works in person, and therefore having some other type of experience with that work is ideal. I mean, it allows more people to experience it to some degree.
Or in some cases, would allow anyone to experience it at all.
Yeah.
But on the other hand, though, I don't know, I have some questions, but I think I agree at least in part with what he's saying about, Like this culture that arises from the mass production of images of art works does in some way cause a devaluation of the power and authenticity of the original that. You can imagine how you would experience and artwork differently if you could not just summon on your phone a picture of the Mona Lisa or the Anatomy Lesson or whatever whenever you wanted to, or even before that, see a picture of it in a book you know, or see a picture reproduced in a newspaper or whatever. I guess the irony is that I've never lived at a time when there was not mass mechanical reproduction of art in all its forms. So I can't really compare this world to the before times. I never lived in the before times, so I don't know, you know, I only know the world where you can buy prints of the Mona Lisa for five bucks.
I guess one thing that we might compare it to is various art installations and also these sort of attraction themed art exhibits that that we find a lot of times these days where there is something inherent to the art. Maybe it's on a scale that can't be captured in a photograph, or it is like an environment that you were engaging in, or it's just something as simple as a sculpture garden, you know, like, yes, you can see like it's not two dimensional, there's a three dimensional reality to it. There are multiple angles from which to consider it, and therefore, you know, it is an experience in a way that I think everybody can wrap their heads around. And maybe the challenge there is to realize that that that all these other forms of like two dimensional visual art, of course, you know, they're often there's often more than just those two dimensions to consider. With the painting but still like even famous paintings are also the sort of an experience, like there is there is more going on there, even if you're not like standing in its shadow or getting a selfie made with it, like, there is still an experience to be had in its presence.
Absolutely, though again we also have to wonder, like how the general culture of mechanical reproduction has affected even our ability to relate to physical originals now right.
Right, because when we do go to those big art installations, if there're one, that is, if it's an if it's an installation that is marketed as hey, get yourself, you made this sor in this environment, then we're coming back right back around to turning it into a mass produced image and mass produced and then personalized image that then goes into your social media feed.
I should add finally that there is there's a whole bunch of other stuff. This essay goes into about the role of art and mechanical reproduction of art and how that relates to politics and the role of art in manipulating mass opinion and revolution and things like that.
All right, before we close out this episode, I do want to come back to something we're talking about earlier about this question of why might it be the case that during one's formative years, during one's teenage years, this question of authenticity and art was more maybe seem more important, and brought up the idea that it might be connected to like the highly social aspects of the teenage brain. I was thinking about this because I was reading an interesting take on all of this from author Jason Tugau on Psychology Today, which tackles the subject of art forgery via neuroesthetics, which is a discipline that looks at the neural basis of how we perceive, contemplate, and even create works of art. So, in neuroesthetics, which is very much a young and continually evolving area of neurosciences, you know, because it depends on what we know and understand about the brain and neural networks and so forth, there's this idea that art engages the social brain, as viewing and considering artwork depends on some of the same networks involved in complex social behavior.
Interesting, okay.
Furthermore, focused consideration of a work of art engages a number of senses, invoking a pronounced consideration of space as well as societal, cultural, and individual context. So even if you, and I think we can if we're if we're really self analyze, we might realize this is the case. Even if we're at that museum and we're like, Okay, I'm going to stand in the presence of this art. You you can't help, but also take into account all these other things. There's a lot going on you on some level. You're going to be aware of how you look looking at this piece of art. You are going to be thinking about your own culture, the culture from which the this this art or artist emerged, and so forth.
It is nearly maybe I reveal my own shallowness or something by saying this, but I think it is nearly impossible to experience a work of art without having involuntary thoughts while you're having the experience of what other people would think about it, and considering your self in relation to these hypothetical other people whom you're imagining reacting to it.
Yeah. Yeah, and so in my experience off and have to sort of check back in and realize like, no, no, no, but stop thinking about that, let's just look the art, and so forth. So there's a lot going on when we look at art. But to gall citing feeling of beauty author Gabriel Starr says that the result, the ideal result here when we're viewing art is a feeling of harmony, a harmony that can be disrupted if we learn that the piece of art reviewing is not authentic, which is to say, you know, fake to some degree or another. And and this makes sense, this falls along with what we've been talking about. I think we can easily turn to various experiences of disruption in our association with any given work of art or creative project. You know what happens when you find out a piece of work is to some degree inauthentic. What about when you find out that the creator to some degree is inauthentic or they are not what you thought they were. Your appreciation of a work may not depend one hundred percent on that idea that you had about its creator's authenticity or character, but a change is still likely to occur. And I think we can all think too examples of that in our own appreciation of the arts.
Yeah, there is a feeling of betrayal that comes when you find out something, You find out something you really don't like about the creator of a work of art that you do like. That is not present when you just find out something you don't like about a random public figure.
Yeah, yeah, and it's it's, it's it can be a struggle sometimes, you know, and at times it can feel like if you enjoy a particular work of art or a film or music, you don't want to know too much about the person who created it, because if you the more you know, the more likely you are to find something that you disagree with or don't like and then could tarnish the work of art. But then the other side is there's also lots of stuff you can find out about an artist that enhances your experience of a given work. So it's it's often it often seems like it's worth diving into. You know, you may find something that enhances your understanding of art that is already enriching your life.
Nevertheless, I think even if you're not thinking about the artist, I totally see what you were saying here about this source claiming that our experience of art is to a large degree engaging the social brain. That seems very true to me. That whether it's you know that music, the band you like, you worry if they're the real deal or if they're fake or it's movies or it's painting. I feel like it is. It's inescapable that there's some part of engaging with the work of art that's kind of like meeting a person, or it's kind of like considering interactions between a social group that rings very true to me.
All Right, well, we're gonna go ahead and cut it off right here, but obviously we'd love to hear from you out there, because I know that listeners inevitably have thoughts about all of this, about inauthenticity and authenticity and fakery in them, in the various mediums, the various art forms that we've discussed here, or life in general. So write in we would love to hear from you. We'll throw out that email address here in a minute, but just a remind it. The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday, short form episode on Wednesdays. On Mondays, we do listener may on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. You can follow us on social media wherever you get your social media, We're probably there rate and review the show wherever you have the power to do so. That really helps us out and we appreciate it, and I believe that's it. What else do you have for us here, Joe?
Nothing else except to say our regular audio producer JJ Posway is out this week, so huge thanks to our guest producer Paul Decant. Thank you, Paul. Let's see if you have anything you'd like to get in touch with us with, if you'd like to suggest a topic for a future episode, if you would like to send us feedback on this episode or any other, or if you'd just like to say hi, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
