Contemporary culture seems to be obsessed with the authentic, and great pains (and buckets of money) are spent convincing us all that a place or product or experience is the ‘real thing’. Tourism and architecture are both particularly focused on this, and the globe seems to have been cut up into ‘authentic destinations’ where one can experience the ‘real’ India, Italy, etc.

A turf war is constantly waged over what is ‘real’ - the undeniable charms of Amalfi or the depressing social realism of outer suburban Naples; the grit of a Melbourne laneway or the bare expanse of north Docklands - and this won’t be resolved any time soon. I could wax on about how this obsession is perhaps a logical response to the excess of bullshit we are all wading through on a daily basis, but you’ve doubtless read more scholarly explorations of that elsewhere.

I am increasingly dismissive of the idea of authenticity. Instead I have been toying with the idea of engaging with the actual - what is actually going on, when you peel back the skin of meaning and mediation that things are cloaked by. Of course, you can’t ever really get to a definitive statement of a situation, but the point is that if you aim your aspirations in a direction other than the authentic, some different and thus interesting things happen. The corollary to this is the idea of opposing the original with the specific, the two pairs are quite closely related.