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 AI. A backlash to their indifference to veracity is overdue, and the expectation that “fine” artists are independent (i.e., not compromised) makes them good alternatives to go to for relief from disbelief. We want them to be “authentic”…
But what makes using the term “authenticity” wobbly is that role as a signal for sincerity, truth, morality, or essence — too often merely the lexicon of preaching to the choir, or of hype.
What people are typically getting at when using it that way is that something is exceptional because it meets some definitive standard. The problem usually comes from the tacit arbitrary assumptions that there is necessarily only one “correct” originator (the “author”) or that the standard in mind is “superior” to other standards.
Observed as active adherence to chosen values, integrity becomes expressive of the value holder, namely the source creator of the work produced, and “authenticity” labels the experienced presence of that integrity. (Which explains why it is easy to associate that behavior with the art worker as “identity”… one that charms, reassures, or recruits us from the anxiety of uncertainty.)
It’s easy to understand how that pertains to their experience of art. But both the meaning and power of authenticity are clearer in the larger context of how the encounter with art work comprises both the launch and the target of engagement.
In art encounters, authenticity is simply not enough to account for art’s power to attract and influence. And it certainly cannot be a prerequisite, because other factors prove to be powerfully independent of it, whether we want them to be or not.
However, 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 is, authenticity is not an imperative; it is a strategy. In art, 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.
