The Art of Engaging Artworks
Understanding Art Engagement
It’s 2025, and in much current topical writing about what makes today’s art valuable, authenticity is fighting hard to top the list as the word most likely to appear.
That may be due to the pervasive unholy trio of doubt-makers: social media, politics, and Artificial Intelligence. Given their rampant indifference to veracity, a backlash is overdue.
And meanwhile there is the expectation that “fine” artists are independent (i.e., not compromised). For relief from disbelief, that makes artists good alternatives to go to. We then want them to be “authentic”… their works to have authenticity.
But what makes using the term “authenticity” wobbly is its current role as a signal for sincerity, truth, morality, or essence — too often the lexicon of preaching to the choir, or of hype. Yes, #virtue is their hashtag.
But what people are typically getting at when using “authentic” that way is that something is exceptional because it exceeds the accepted business-as-usual offer by meeting a definitive high standard. This also assumes that the standard they have in mind is “superior” to other standards.
What makes this further problematic is an assumption, both tacit and arbitrary, that the corresponding originator of the exception is equally rare. Exaggerated, that gives the idea of the thing itself being a proof, not just a sign, of its originator’s (author’s) character. This actually collapses “authenticity” into “standard-bearing”, making it a bit harder to distinguish from fandom, political correctness, or other things readily susceptible to fickleness, manipulation, and marketing.
If we are one of those people, it’s easy to understand how that idea of “authentic” pertains to the experience of art. Psychologists call it mirroring. And with lots of art, that works.
But the real meaning of authenticity, and its power, are seen more clearly at a deeper level: in the larger context of how the encounter with art work comprises both the launch and the target of engagement.
In engagement: active adherence to a chosen set of values is observed as integrity. Integrity becomes expressive of the value holder, who initially is the source creator of the work produced. “Authenticity” labels the experienced presence of that integrity. (That explains why it is easy to associate that behavior with the art worker as “identity”… a persona that charms, reassures, or recruits us from our anxiety of uncertainty.)
In art encounters, however, that authenticity simply is not enough to account for art’s power to attract and influence. And it certainly cannot be a prerequisite because, as we’ll see, other factors prove to be powerfully independent of it, whether we want them to be or not.
Still, the notion of an artist’s set of values being the formative principle of doing art work elegantly encompasses everything from conceptual art to DaDa, surrealism, impressionism, expressionism, realism, neorealism, pop, hieroglyphics, or whatever.
And the point of that is, authenticity is not an imperative; it is a strategy. We can always ask why we want it or need it, and we can always acknowledge that sometimes we neither need it nor want it.
Just as we experience tangible reality in three dimensions (if not four), an artwork has a multidimensional presence. on a case by case basis, we can need or prefer (i.e., value) any one of the dimensions more than the others; but the work always features all dimensions to one degree or another.
Seen as below, the more an artwork includes all three, the more powerful is its attraction and impact. Our vocabulary for what we get from a work and how we react to it consistently points at how these are dimensions of attraction in engagement. This doesn’t argue that any one of them is inherently more important than the others. But where authenticity matters, we can see what experiences it helps to generate.
