The Art Market’s Love Affair with Authenticity

There’s a lot of talk about authenticity in the art market right now, and honestly, I’m glad. I hear from serious collectors that they’re tired of work that feels engineered to please an algorithm, a fair, or a trend report. What they’re really looking for is contact with lived experience — not the performance of emotion, but the residue of it. For me, authenticity means the painting carries evidence of decisions that cost something. You can see where I pushed too far, where I had to repair, where a colour almost collapsed the balance and I wrestled it back. That tension is the record of being present. You can’t fake that. The danger, of course, is that ‘authenticity’ itself can become a style that gets packaged and sold. My responsibility is to stay awake to that pressure and keep making work that is honest to my own urgency, not just believable to the market.