Authenticity is a valuable, often enduring quality of individuals, organizations, artefacts and experiences, associated with originality and desperately sought in aesthetic capitalism. Yet many imitative products deliberately dispense with their own authenticity and still thrive in consumer markets. It is puzzling, how products that are not the real thing or even openly fake, position themselves in relation to claims of authenticity. To explore the productivity of an ‘authenticity of being fake’, this ethnographic study follows tribute bands that devote their creative practice to becoming exact copies of an original. It focuses on performances at ‘Fake Festivals’, a UK-based festival tour featuring only tribute bands. Groups involved in festival performances (performers, audiences, and organizers) claim authenticity through mutually constitutive strategies of creating edges of originality, social relevance, and a carnival atmosphere. These strategies simultaneously take possession of ‘original’ and ‘fake’ in order to co-create temporally constrained, yet socially valued moments of authenticity. Arguing that the authenticity of fakes is instructive for a relational view of authenticity experiences in aesthetic capitalism, the study contributes to understanding authenticity as both a temporal experience and a co-created phenomenon.
