“Made by hand” declares the label on my pot of jam. It was a present, and it is beautiful jam, lovingly potted and elegantly labelled and fully organic and all that. I doubt none of its claims. But the “hand-made” thing stopped me for a moment. How else does jam get made? Well, by machine, of course – but somehow I’d never bothered to think about it. And when I did, I realised I was not so much impressed by the hand-madeness of my jam but repelled by the thought of the mechanised production of other jams. I had an image of horrible lumpy-fruity slime oozing bloodily through metallic tubes – well, enough. Mine’s hand-made. I’m all right.
We live in a mechanised age that is mad for authenticity, for individuation. We may preach democratisation, yet the word “exclusive” is used to promote opera ticket offers and crocus bulbs, holidays and handbags, without a twitch of ironic self-knowledge. Talking of handbags, in fact, takes us straight to the very heights of idiocy in the craze for the “real”. Women spend many thousands on a single item, simply because it accords with some notion of the real thing – as marketed to us, as seen on the arm of this celeb or that. It is not intrinsically more beautiful, certainly not more functional, than a bag costing a fraction of the price, or indeed than one of the knock-offs that abound on every street corner, but it is far, far more pleasing. It’s real.
In cultural terms, the real, the “authentic”, is all-important. The attribution of paintings from the past can make a difference of millions, and the discovery of even a few previously unknown lines doodled or daubed by the hand of a master is news. But it has always been a tricky notion, a blurry concept even more complex in the contemporary art world. If we paid the astronomical prices of the current artist-celebrities, would we be paying for some invisible “hand-made” label? Or for something else? It is no secret that Lord Foster did not design the Gherkin. It is obvious that Damien Hirst did not cut and set those diamonds himself. Mark Quinn’s marble sculpture of Alison Lapper, which graced the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, was made in the marble quarries of Pietrasanta in Tuscany. And so on.
Edwin Heathcote’s interview with Anthony Caro gives a vivid picture of how a large, modern sculptor’s studio works and how an artist can, with the help of assistants, create something that he does not know how to build in practical terms. Such studios are the essence of modern conceptual art but they have something almost medieval about them too, the idea of apprenticeship to a master, and of craftsmanship that backs up the artist’s vision. Thus authenticity, in terms of creative art, may be about a vision or a concept, and need not have much to do with a label declaring something to be hand-made. Rodin employed some 50 assistants in his studio and probably never laid a finger on “The Kiss”. But he made the maquette for the larger sculpture, his was the vision and the creative energy: it is undeniably his work. It is nothing like handbags.
That’s the theory, and the practice, at its best and clearest. Where it gets blurry is when it appears that artists’ names have become brands: then the handbag analogy suddenly seems to apply only too well. Hirst’s venture into designing jeans for Levi’s, and the fact that those jeans are going to cost $4,000 a pair, might underline the point.
When it comes to creative writing, notions of authenticity are much stricter. Regular “plagiarism” scandals show us to be easily shockable: the master’s fingers must hit that keyboard in a sequence that is uniquely his or her own, no cheating. It’s hand-made or nothing. True, it was in literary theory that the death of the author was once announced – although such notions now seem quaintly dated. Yet authors play around with their selves, literary and literal, and their fame, in a way that visual artists seldom do. J.M. Coetzee – perhaps the most lauded writer in the English language at the moment – is famous for the creation of Elizabeth Costello, an alter ego who pretty much accepted his Nobel Prize for him. His latest book, Diary of a Bad Year, features a character called JC who both is and isn’t John Coetzee, in a series of feints and teases and quasi-revelations that plays endlessly with the subject of identity. It’s a long way from Levi’s.
The photographer Ianthe Ruthven, whose pictures of the Thames are on display in the foyer of the Olivier Theatre in London at the moment, had a show not long ago of wonderfully intricate, mysterious, abstract patterns. When you discovered that these were the tracks of a certain kind of worm, superbly photographed at low tide, all was made clear – and all was completely changed, in your perception of what you were looking at. Authorship – our knowledge of who made a certain thing, and how – does matter. Even when the author is a worm.
Peter Aspden returns next week
