After Authenticity
Recently on my commute I passed someone wearing an Obey shirt. I was reminded of friends and internet commenters on forums I once frequented. They used to gripe about Shepard Fairey leveraging his success as a street artist to create the Obey skate clothing line. Their complaints always came down to “authenticity,” something Fairey ostensibly surrendered when he turned his classic Andre the Giant image into a saleable commodity.
But I haven’t heard about anyone selling out in a long while. Sometime between 2008 and 2018, capitalizing on your success as an artist to build a skate brand went from being reprehensible to being the thing that everyone is doing. I’ve heard people credit this phenomenon to Kanye and Yeezy Supply. Stories are memetically powerful and Kanye’s celebrity martyrdom to create his fashion brand is a story of mythological proportion. Did Yeezus die so we all could sell dad hats and zines? His skate-inspired tour merch popups for Yeezus and The Life of Pablo have inspired copycats, but this goes beyond streetwear, beyond fashion. Right now merely having a self-branded commercial presence is itself seen as a meritable achievement.
Shepard Fairey’s commercialization was deemed problematic, yet the same thing today would today be considered utterly normal. It seems reasonable to suggest that the cultural obsession with authenticity has evaporated entirely. All forms of “personal branding” are just one facet of an ethical shift of such enormous proportions that it encompasses nearly every major cultural development of the last 20 years, and authenticity is at the heart of it. During the first two decades of the 21st century we saw the rise of a caste of self-appointed authenticity custodians we called “hipsters.” We saw the development of an visual aesthetic and a language of authenticity that dominated millennial consumer culture. And in the dwindling twilight of authenticity culture we saw the rise of a new ethical paradigm.
