MCAT CARS Question of the Day

In the gallery notes for a recent exhibition, the curator assures us that the work on display resists the market's appetite for novelty by returning to a preindustrial craft tradition. The suggestion is that authenticity resides in material stubbornness, in the obstinate refusal to be pulled into the currents of fashion. Yet as viewers trace the room's carefully plotted sequence—from wall text to spotlighted plinth to companion video—what they encounter is less a resistance to mediation than its orchestration. The very claim to authenticity is staged, quite literally, as a dramaturgy of restraint: objects appear unadorned, labels adopt an ascetic tone, and the lighting simulates daylight. We might be tempted to denounce this as hypocrisy, but such a judgment misunderstands the conditions under which contemporary art reaches the public. Between studio and audience lies an apparatus—museums, catalogs, social media feeds, philanthropic boards—that does not merely present a work; it confers legibility on it. The curator's interpretive labor is part of that conferral. To point this out is not to diminish the artist's craft. It is to recognize that the aura of authenticity so prized by the exhibition is neither a property inherent to certain materials nor a relic preserved intact from a slower time. Rather, it is a social effect, achieved through framing devices that teach us how to look, where to stand, and what to value. The paradox is that the more loudly one insists on authenticity as an absence of mediation, the more elaborate the mediations required to persuade us. Consider how often exhibitions of "outsider" artists replicate the trappings of the academy they reject: the monograph, the symposium, the docent tour that scripts an anti-institutional narrative within an institution's walls. This does not make authenticity a sham; it makes it a practice. It lives in choices about sequence and silence, in which story is told first and which is left in reserve. The curator becomes less a neutral conduit than a coauthor, responsible for the conditions under which works are received. Critics who wish to defend authenticity would do better to ask for accountable mediation than for its impossible absence. If we stop equating authenticity with unprocessed origin and begin thinking of it as a way of arranging encounters—honest about its own devices, attentive to the histories it invokes—then the museum's stage can become a site of ethical relation rather than a mask. The gallery notes, read this way, need not be an alibi; they can be an admission that we never meet art alone.