ABSTRACT
Notions of originality and authenticity, and of the relation of detailed information to "truth," underlie museums' presentations of the objects they administer. Museums invent a version of reality by suggesting that authenticity is dependent on systematized, realistic detail, something that is true in other milieus as well. The fashion industry's commodification of the designer's name is extremely similar to what occurs in the marketing of museum reproductions; techniques of marketing are more obvious in the former because fashion falls somewhere between art and commerce. So much of the art of the last fifty years or so has made claims to criticality, which in part is the legacy of the Parisian ideas of bohemianism that have informed the art world since the nineteenth century. The marketing of 1980s New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is exemplary of how false demands and expectations can turn a body of art work and the artist himself into something dead, into commodities.
