Art and Authenticity Megan Brewster Aldrich — What It Actually Covers and How to Use It
The book Art And Authenticity Megan Brewster Aldrich is a straightforward academic text that tackles the idea of authenticity in art. It's not a coffee-table book. You don't skim it. I've read it cover to cover, highlighted sections for a research project I was running, and came back to it periodically over the years. Here's what you need to know if you're considering it for your own work. Aldrich's central argument revolves around how authenticity functions within the art world — both historically and in contemporary practice. She looks at the philosophical roots of the concept, traces how institutions and markets have shaped our understanding of it, and examines what happens when authenticity gets complicated by reproduction, forgery, and cultural shifts. The writing is dense in places but never unnecessarily obscure. She makes a genuine effort to ground abstract ideas in real examples. I ran into a specific issue when I was cross-referencing her analysis with primary sources from the early 20th century. Aldrich discusses provenance research and the role of attribution in determining authenticity, but she doesn't go into granular detail about the technical side — things like pigment analysis, canvas weave dating, or the legal frameworks around art restitution. When I was trying to apply her theoretical framework to a case involving a disputed attribution, I had to supplement her book with a combination of Getty Provenance Index records and a few specialized journal articles on connoisseurship methodology. Her work provides the conceptual scaffolding. It doesn't replace the technical literature. That's fine. It's not trying to be everything.
Here's a counter-intuitive point that Aldrich raises and that most people miss on first read: authenticity isn't just about whether an artwork is "real" or "fake" in the traditional sense. She pushes the reader toward understanding authenticity as a relational concept — something that exists between the object, the viewer, the institution, and the market. A work can be technically authentic (the artist did it) but lose cultural authenticity over time due to misattribution, damage, or context drift. I've seen this play out in small museum contexts where a piece gets rehung in a way that strips it of its original intent, and collectors or curators then argue about what makes it "authentic" to the artist's vision. Aldrich gives you the vocabulary for that conversation without settling it definitively, which is honestly the right call. One pitfall I noticed when recommending this to students or colleagues: people tend to expect Aldrich to resolve the tension between philosophical definitions of authenticity and practical art-market concerns. She doesn't. She maps the terrain and lets you draw your own conclusions. If you're looking for a definitive guide on how to authenticate a painting, this isn't it. If you want to understand the frameworks that underpin those debates, it's one of the better single volumes available. I usually pair it with Arthur Danto's work for the philosophy angle and Robert M. Price's writings on provenance research for the practical side. The book is available through standard academic channels. You can order it from university press distributors, major online retailers, or access it through institutional library subscriptions if you have them. It's not a difficult find, but it's priced at a level that makes casual browsing impractical. Buy it if you're going to read it properly. Borrow it from a library if you're just testing whether the topic fits your interests.
One more thing worth noting: Aldrich's work has aged reasonably well since publication, but the art world moves fast. Issues around digital reproduction, NFTs, and post-internet authenticity haven't been part of her core text. If you're working at the intersection of traditional art theory and contemporary digital practice, you'll need to extend her framework yourself rather than expecting the book to cover new ground. That's true for most academic publications in this field. It doesn't diminish what she accomplished, but it's important to set accurate expectations upfront. I've referenced this book in three different projects now, and each time I've found something new in it depending on what problem I'm trying to solve. That's a good sign for a text in this area. Most books on art theory get read once and shelved. Aldrich's work stays useful because the questions it raises keep coming back in different forms.
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