If authenticity in philosophy and psychology overlap in terms of the notion of being true to oneself the truth in truth to oneself suggests an overlap between the authenticity of human being and the authenticity of works of art. In “Authenticity in art”, Denis Dutton identifies two distinct conceptions of authenticity relevant to art, nominal and expressive. Nominal authenticity is contrasted with forgery and plagiarism. In the former, an artist creates a work in the style of another more famous artist in order to sell the work as the work of the other artist and maximise profit. Plagiarism occurs when one author appropriates the work of another author without permission or disclosure of their source in order to pass the work off as their own and may be committed for a variety of motives. Expressive authenticity is the kind with which I am concerned and refers to the authority of the artist, truth to the character of the artist, or a combination of the two. Expressive authenticity is most closely associated with Romanticism, the intellectual and artistic movement that underpinned the Romantic Era and focused artistic value on the artist, specifically the artist’s unique individuality and genius. The Romantics had a specific conception of genius in mind, what Immanuel Kant defined as the natural capacity of an artist to produce works of art that meet the criteria for beauty established in his Third Critique. In Romantic criticism, authenticity is a value of art and the authenticity of a work of art is the extent to which it expresses the character, individuality, and emotion of the artist. This is the sense in which one might, for example, praise the poem “Yew-Trees” as an authentic expression of Wordsworth’s reverence for Taxus baccata.

The relation between individuality and subjectivity on the one hand and artistic authenticity on the other hand is related to the question of the cognitive value of art. The sense in which authenticity refers to the real and the genuine foregrounds the different ways in which art provides knowledge about the world. These are often described in a bewildering variety of terms, which include but are not restricted to: accuracy, correspondence, lifelikeness, likeness, mimesis, naturalism, representation of the world as it is, resemblance, truth to life, verisimilitude, and vividness. The descriptions can be separated into two types. In the first, the artist attempts to achieve likeness in representation by means of transparency and objectivity, i.e. the creator recreates the objects of perception for the audience. Colour photographs are (typically) paradigmatic in this respect, providing (relatively) objective knowledge about the world, knowledge that is as transparent as possible given the filter of the artist. In the second, the artist attempts to achieve lifelikeness in representation by means of opacity and subjectivity, i.e. the creator recreates his or her experience of perceiving the objects for the audience. Impressionist paintings are (typically) paradigmatic in this respect, providing (relatively) subjective knowledge about the world, knowledge that is opaque as deliberately filtered through the artist’s experience. Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Dance at the Moulin de la Galette both provide information about the world, but they do so in dramatically different ways. One can thus distinguish two types of cognitive value of art, accuracy as truth in art and authenticity as truth to lived experience or truth to life.

The cognitive value of authenticity is usually, although not necessarily, more significant than the cognitive value of accuracy in works of art. In contrast, scientific practice is usually, although not necessarily, intended to be accurate rather than authentic. Microscopes and telescopes reveal reality in a more accurate manner than paintings and drawings. Similarly, discursive texts usually provide a more objective representation than narrative texts, even when the latter are classified as non-fiction rather than fiction. This is not to say that accuracy cannot be a value of art or that accuracy should not be a value of art, but that works of art standardly have a greater potential for authenticity than accuracy. The aesthetic techniques and devices typically employed by artists result in works of art being able to represent and reveal lived experience in ways that are not open to scientific inquiry. In other words, the practice of science is better at providing accurate knowledge and worse at providing authentic knowledge and the practice of art is better at providing authentic knowledge and worse at providing accurate knowledge (although both practices are cognitively valuable in both ways). An advantage of adopting this approach to the cognitive value of art is that it establishes art both as a complementary practice to science and as an equal rather than inferior means of accessing reality. As such, this approach overlaps with Smith’s cultural level of inquiry, furnishing a further parallel in the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences.

Thus far, I have discussed the following two conceptions of authenticity: (1) truth to oneself in human being by projecting towards shared ends of one’s own choosing and (2) truth to life in an artwork by providing knowledge of the artist’s experience of the world. The two are similar in that they both prioritise individual subjectivity while recognising and acknowledging the subjectivity of the other. In the same way that the ethical subject must select projects that are other-regarding in order to avoid an absurd life so the artist must represent his or her subjective experience in a manner that can be understood by his or her audience in order for the work to succeed. The conceptions are also complementary rather than contradictory: returning to the Romantic celebration of genius, there is no inherent conflict between the expression of one’s projects and character by means of sharing one’s experience of the world and as long as the authenticity expressed in the work of art is true to the life of the artist, then the ethical value does not detract from the cognitive value. One might also expect that a rich and complex projection towards carefully-considered ends is expressed in an imaginative and sophisticated manner by an artist, which introduces the third conception of authenticity with which I am concerned: (3) truth to the mode of representation.