The Wit’s Guide to Authenticity

Or, the dessert pizza of the real

I’m Gonna Need To See Some ID, Han van Meegeren, 1936–1937

Authenticity is a scam, especially in the art world. The second-best example of this is Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist who forged Vermeers (traitor!) but managed to sell one to an unsuspecting Hermann Göring (rogue!). The best example is Xiao Yuan, the librarian of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts who made a fortune by swapping out valuable paintings for his replicas — but argued that many of the originals had already been duped when he got there, and many of his forgeries were soon replaced by more egregious duplicates. As he told the court,“I realised someone else had replaced my paintings with their own because I could clearly discern that their works were terribly bad.” You think it’s turtles all the way down, but then you learn someone’s swapped them all out with old bike helmets.

“For the amateur the funniest thing in the world is the sight of a man dressed up as an old woman rolling down a steep hill in a wheelchair and crashing into a wall at the bottom of it. But to make a pro laugh, it would have to be a real old woman.”
— Groucho Marx

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor created the modern idea of authenticity, a search for what it specifically is that makes you you. It was easier back in feudal times, when the son of a blacksmith knew exactly who he was, and a guy named Taylor would be hemming pants instead of thinking thoughts. But now we’re gifted/burdened with the freedom/anxiety of discovering who we truly are. To cash in on this finding, the clever philosopher licensed his name to Converse, thus birthing Chuck Taylors, a stylish shortcut to true originality.

“Genuineness only thrives in the dark, like celery.”
— Aldous Huxley

When I told Teddy I was writing about authenticity, he said I should mention pizza. I honestly wasn’t sure he’d know what the word meant, but then I remembered that we’ve inadvertently (well, maybe slightly advertently) raised a Neapolitan pie snob — in his world, authenticity explains why Libretto is streets ahead of Pizza Nova. Which reminded me of Stay True, Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer-winning memoir about a lost friend and trying to be who you authentically are, though my favourite passage of that book was a total aside. Hsu is volunteering to tutor inmates at San Quentin prison and describes a student named Lefty: “He seemed gentle to a fault. ‘I just have one question,’ he said one day. ‘What’s pizza like now?’ Had we, as a society, come up with new toppings, new shapes? He was awestruck when I described the concept of a stuffed crust and revolted by the thought of ‘dessert pizza.’”

“If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake, you are no longer authentic.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre

As Jean Baudrillard explained in his groundbreaking 1999 film The Matrix, we all now live in “the dessert of the real.” And his recommendation couldn’t be clearer: “Ask the waiter to bring extra forks because we’re all going to want to have a taste.” Oh wait, that’s a Baudrillard dupe. Authenticity matters, for real!

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Looking through my voluminous library of Riposte Cards — or shall I say your voluminous library, as my OG paid subscribers have a complete set — this lovingly macabre illustration by Natàlia Pàmies Lluís sums up the challenge of authenticity with not one but two severed hands. Upgrade your subscription today and I’ll mail it to you!

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“A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one and the real one.”
— John Pierpont Morgan

Here’s another authenticity question: To generate last week’s topic ideas, and specifically authenticity, I fed every Wit’s Guide subject into ChatGPT and asked it to suggest ones we hadn’t covered. Is that less than authentic? Or useful co-intelligence? Reader, you chose the one it generated!

Get Wit Quick Issue No. 308 was even better than the real thing. And by The Real Thing, I mean not Tom Stoppard’s 1982 play but Kurt Andersen’s oddball 1980 book that promises to separate “the men from the boys, the wheat from the chaff, and the bogus from the bona fide.” In categories like industrial food, boring countries, and days of the week, Andersen proclaims the real thing (Cheetos, Belgium, and Thursday). It’s like a time capsule from another planet where clever English is spoken to describe illogical phenomena. When it comes to furniture, he argues that the ottoman is the real thing, “ugly, overpriced and existing to provide only a superfluous kind of sedentary middle-aged comfort.” The book’s one lasting contribution to the culture is its proclamation of Bert and Ernie as the real thing when it comes to homosexuality. “They do their jobs well and live a splendidly settled life in an impeccably decorated cabinet,” Andersen writes. This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck, which was modelled after IBM Selectric typewriters. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. A tap of the ❤️ below is the best way to be yourself on my behalf.