ABSTRACT
This chapter examines forms of authentication which arise from the dialogue between art, artists, tourists and places. It explores the 'soft' places of imagination and wonder, suggesting that art destabalises, reinvents, intervenes, immerses, articulates poetics, forges imaginaries and evokes the surreal. The chapter examines the consumption of art and its relationship with authenticity and then explores different spaces of imagination, suggesting that some large-scale, site-specific art can reach beyond real, fake and post-truth to the uncanny, or magically real. Some types of site-specific art seem to perfectly inhabit the concept of third-order simulacra; they are creations for which there is not an existing blueprint. Art and place are often inextricable; site-specific art draws from and informs the character of locations, while remaining both separate and part of them. Hyperreality is intensified in other large-scale individual pieces of site-specific art that involve bringing the unnatural into the remoter natural environment, modifying and extending nature to create a surreal simulacrum.
