An excerpt from Ted Gioia’s recent “Authenticity in Music”:

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.
So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

Authenticity is a wave, and practiced by individuals, not groups. You don’t go to the marketplace and pronounce “all of you should be authentic!” Even if everyone agreed, it would be immediately be performative, because the concept would be interpreted as a group. And a group of people only determines what the average of a concept is, so everyone can accessibly emulate it. What is creative to the group? Painting, music, writing, etc. What is leadership to a group? Heroic command of others. What is integrity? Transparent responsibility for one’s actions.

But these words mean very different things to the individual. Creativity can be the arrangement of rocks around a fire lookout tower in the middle of Montana. Leadership may come in the form of questions from an outsider, not commands from the insider. Integrity may mean someone’s responsibility to their own values, not others’.

Authenticity as a cultural foundation is an oxymoron. The person recognized as “authentic” by others just exhibits traits of authenticity agreed upon for the time being. It’s part of the zeitgeist. Authenticity is not described, it’s lived. And to its consumers, authentic works are only experienced, and recognized later as “authentic” if it fits in the culture’s definition.

Authenticity in its truest form is nurtured in small, one-to-one moments. Do you ever notice how you and your friends change voice, change mind, change demeanor when more than 2 people converge? The intimacy is gone, and now you are living in an averaged existence of the group.

The good thing for Gioia is that he’s focused on authenticity in music, which has a great history and future of few people truly making music authentically. The musician can be alone and just make music without pretense. Doing it for themselves.

Where teams are involved, there is little to no authenticity. Does this mean that the music is less-than? No, it’s just not authentic. The pop artist is part of a team attempting to figure out what pop music will sound like in the next few months when they finally release the song or album. The rock band is trying to figure out what sounds good for all 2, 3, 4 ,5+ of them (at least those that actually have a say in the direction of the piece). Teams are great at averaging out what a sound can be, which can make it even more likely to achieve success, commercially or culturally.

The authentic musician will likely not be tied to genre, or culture. They will likely not find success, though sometimes after they’re dead. This is because they’ll be making something that speaks to them, not others. They’ll even more likely never release it, because it’s not their goal. They made it for themselves. Some small percentage of authentic artists will release their stuff, likely because someone told them to do it after they showed it to others one-on-one.

My tone sounds as if I’m arguing against Gioia, but he’s come to similar conclusions. Mine’s just shorter. He thinks of a solution:

What does this mean in practical terms? First and foremost, we need to be willing to make that essential first step in any authentic artistic experience—namely, we must be willing to go to where the artist is, rather than force the artist to adapt to our expectations. We open ourselves up, rather than close ourselves down. We broaden our horizons, and perhaps even find that our comfort zones are larger than we previously realized. Instead of seeking the familiar formulas, we allow ourselves to be beguiled by the artist’s inner truth.

Similar to the counterculture piece from a bit ago. We do need to meet the artist where they are, so they can create and perform for themselves, where we can join them in that experience, if they’re willing to share.

The commercial method of “I pay so you come to me and perform for me” is not the recipe for success in one’s authenticity. That requires an eye for scaling, for averaging.

If we extend this out to general authenticity, it’s not where others are. Authenticity is a lived practice, and just like wu-wei in Daoism, it isn’t even thought about when it’s practiced. It just is, and the unfortunate over-thinkers like myself hopefully get to recognize it for what it is, and then lose sight of what another generation of authenticity will bring for us as we get our noses dug into the past searching for other instances for the average “authentic person”.