A practitioner’s guide to faking it

Abstract

This thesis explores the concepts of authenticity, sincerity, and their perceived opposites in art history: the fake and the forgery. Focusing on the experiential dimensions of art, I examine how these concepts construct notions of value in postcolonial contemporary art. The study is framed by three central research questions. Firstly, why has authenticity, a term best used in evaluating the materiality or provenance of an historical artefact, gained such purchase in validating and branding the conceptual content of contemporary art, particularly from what are considered emerging markets for speculative investment? Secondly, how might sincerity, as an alignment between internal feeling and outward expression, better evaluate the expressive, reflective and experiential qualities of art? Thirdly, how might a materially inauthentic artwork be considered conceptually authentic, serving as a ‘creative lie’ that reveals sincere experiential truths? The interdisciplinary methodology combines Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological approach to the “realisation of the text”, Susan Stewart’s conception of “the souvenir” as an indexical trace of experience, Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” of an artwork (as that which can only be apprehended through proximity to an original work of art in the here and now), and tourism theorist John P. Taylor’s description of the “zone of contact” created through sincere exchange. These frameworks highlight the dialogical processes through which meaning is co-constructed between artworks and audiences. Chapter One seeks to better define and examine conceptions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘sincerity’, with Iser and Stewart’s ideas applied to a work by Candice Breitz. Chapter Two examines the concepts of the forgery and the fake in relation to the alternate histories created in work by Chad Rossouw, and the critical reception of Andrew Lamprecht’s exhibition: Tretchikoff: The People’s Painter (2011). Chapter Three critiques the influence of museums, branding, market forces, and the role of curatorship, focusing on African representation at the Venice Biennale and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. Chapter Four considers live performative works by Lerato Shadi and Sikhumbuzo Makandula as forms of syncretic ritualising, which borrow from tradition but are not traditional (i.e. not ‘authentic’) but sincere. The study advocates for an experiential engagement with art that values open-ended, personal interactions over fixed narratives or economic imperatives. It investigates sincerity’s transformative potential as a lens for understanding art’s role in reflecting and shaping local cultural expression, as distinct from a performative ‘authenticity’ tailored towards international markets.