Abstract
“Authenticity” is a polysemous and implicitly polemical concept that most often comes into play when it is put in question, such as when the authenticity of an artwork must be established. In fact, authenticity has been described as an exclusionist notion and a contrastive term apophatically defined by what it is not, not by what it is. This chapter aims to clarify the concept by looking at the roots of the term “authenticity” and investigating its origin. A review of the literature reveals four main meanings of the term “authenticity”, i.e., “true to oneself”, Authorship/Originality, “to have mastery of”, “to have full power over”; “made by one’s own hands”, craft; “posit oneself or, set oneself as a thesis”. The chapter also traces the evolution of the notion of authenticity from the premodern to the postmodern era.
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Massi, M. (2023). Authenticity: A Polemical Concept. In: From Art to Marketing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17008-0_1
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