Viewpoint
Authenticities Past and Present(1)
by David Lowenthal
Authenticity will be the buzzword of the 21st century. And what is authentic? Anything not devised and structured to make a profit. Anything that exists for its own sake, that assumes its own shape. But...nothing in the modern world is allowed to assume its own shape. The modern world is the corporate equivalent of a formal garden, where everything is planted and arranged for effect. Where nothing is untouched, where nothing is authentic. And what is the most authentic of all? The past. The past is unarguably authentic. The past is a world that already existed.... The past is real. It's authentic. And this will make the past unbelievably attractive. People...want to visit not other places, but other times...medieval walled cities, Buddhist temples, Mayan pyramids, Egyptian necropolises...the vanished world. And they don't want it to be fake. They don't want it to be made pretty, or cleaned up. They want it to be authentic. —Michael Crichton, Timeline (1999)(2) |
Why is authenticity wanted? Who can say what it is? Are there useful guidelines for what is or is not authentic? No one is sure. And no one has cast more doubt on authenticity and its confusions than I myself over the past half century.
I began with concern about authentic American wilderness, which played an iconic role in the nascent environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Pristine nature was touted as priceless but dwindling, doomed by pollution and development. How authentically wild, I wondered, was that wilderness? Given thousands of years of Indian impress on the continent, little if any of it was untouched; the world we inherited was not wild or pristine, but one substantially refashioned by humans.(3) From nature I went on over the next three decades to query claims of cultural authenticity in sites, relics, memories, and chronicles attesting fabulous but dubious histories.(4)
My role in the 1990 British Museum "Fakes" exhibition taught me that judgments about authenticity depended as much on where as what things were. We displayed scores of original objects—manuscripts, paintings, drawings, sculptures, fossils, archeological remnants—next to long-credited simulations since exposed as forgeries. Lured by the comeuppance of know-it-all experts, visitors thronged to the show. We expected them to laud the true and scoff at the false. But instead they viewed both originals and frauds with reverential awe. Why? Because everything in the imposing British Museum showcases seemed to them ipso facto estimable. Simply being there conferred on those fakes an imprimatur of authenticity.(5)
In the mid-1990s, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) revised the 1964 Venice Charter on heritage conservation. Birthed by states that traditionally built in stone or brick, the Venice Charter had been outdated by the global growth of heritage. Norway and Japan, whose historic buildings are largely of wood, queried criteria of authenticity based on material survival. In wooden structures apt to decay faster than stone or brick, original substance counted for less than faithfulness to form. Recurrently replaced with new timber, a stave church or a Shinto temple still adhered to proportions, techniques, and craftsmanship handed down from antiquity. Authenticity inhered in continuity of form and process, not in the survival of original material.
The farther afield we surveyed the world's heritage, the more we came to doubt that any criterion of authenticity would be valid for all times and cultures. What counted as authentic shifted continually from substance to form to process and to images and ritual performance. Indeed, the very quest for authenticity altered its nature, just as subatomic particles are affected by the act of observing them. Cultural relativity made authenticity a capricious will-o'-the-wisp, even a contradiction in terms.(6)
Faith in authenticity has since frayed still further. It is undermined by ease of replication, forbearance toward plagiarism, post-modern rejection of consensual truth, the abandonment of attested evidence for unvetted "wikipedian" opinion. Sham sells: Oprah Winfrey's rebuke made James Frey's exposed A Million Little Pieces still more lucrative as "non-nonfiction" than it had been as truth.(7) The forger Van Meegeren's fake Vermeers now fetch huge sums, because he "painted the pictures the old master ought to have painted, the pictures we wish he had painted."(8) Who can peer-review submissions to the new journal entitled Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification? Mere mention of authenticity now conjures up its converse. Asked to value a diamond, a jeweler tells the owner it is a fake. "But it came with a certificate of authenticity," he protests. "That should have been your first clue," says the jeweler. In historic preservation, as in heritage generally, what is sought is apt to be the semblance of authenticity, a search that inevitably yields contrivance. Michael Crichton to the contrary, many enjoy the contrived as much as the authentic.(9)
Questioning authenticity led me to query related heritage tenets, notably excessive preservation. Just as remembering entails forgetting, so is conservation inseparable from getting rid of things, within the comprehensive sequence of inheriting, acquiring, making, reshaping, and dispersing everything around us. Every act of preservation transforms what is lost, as well as what is conserved, in our own and others' eyes.(10) How to cope wisely with a heritage in constant flux has confounded stewardship in every realm and epoch.
Today's heritage dilemmas differ in many respects from those of the past. And despite our enhanced techniques they often seem less soluble. One reason is that durability is in growing disfavor: Karl Marx's 1848 maxim "all that is solid melts into air" seems truer now than ever. To curatorial dismay, deliberate evanescence is ever more fashionable among painters and sculptors. Not only are art and artifacts, buildings, and landscapes speedily and thoroughly swept away, ideas and information systems are also increasingly ephemeral. Reliance on electronic media, notably digital technology, threatens the utility and very survival of archives and the collective memories they store.(11)
Heritage today is beset by a bitter clash of values. A universalistic view opposes an exclusivist vision that accords prime agency to national states and ethnic and tribal groups. The first insists that heritage belongs to all, to the whole world together. Every global agency intones the internationalist mantra that heritage is global. And we are all together its collective caretakers. Yet the same agencies simultaneously sanction the exclusive heritage claims of nations, tribes, faiths, and minorities. Each is entitled to do just as it chooses with its own heritage, which need not be shown to, let alone shared with, others. Repatriation of heritage purloined or purchased abroad is morally and more and more legally mandated. The United Nations and UNESCO trumpet the essentialist diktat that heritage belongs to those whose ancestors made it. National laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in the United States enshrine rights of possession based on common law.(12) The two contradictory imperatives pose grievous dilemmas. Heritage managers are caught between conflicting demands to keep or to let go, to display or to conceal, to laud or to lament.
Conflicting views about access confronted the anthropologist Gwyneira Isaac when Zuni leaders asked her to help organize archives in their new museum. Tribal precept determines who may view exhibits in the museum. Non-initiates are barred, much is off limits to women; men gain access as they come of age. To a Western heritage professional such rules are regressive, but Isaac accepted that she would not seek to see what was secret or seek to learn Zuni.(13)
What led Isaac to shelve her own open heritage credo in deference to a tribal precept that mandated exclusion? Beyond wanting to be of service, perhaps a feeling common among mainstream cosmopolitans that tribal heritage is more authentic—less hybrid, less self-conscious, less commodified, less individualistic—than their own. Tribes and minorities enshrine pre-industrial, close-to-nature modes of life whose diversity is at risk. With nostalgic romanticism intensified by the desire to atone for past dispossessions, the heritage community bows to and even promotes subaltern exclusivity. Empowered by sanctimonious global agencies and self-denying scholarly ethics, history's victims become authenticity's victors.
Authentic tribes must, however, remain intact, uncorrupted by modernity. Recent UNESCO protocols on intangible heritage explicitly enjoin aloofness. But such cultural sanitizing flies in the face of historical reality and cripples contemporary agency. No pure, authentically uncontaminated cultures exist anymore, if any ever did. Every people is hybrid in descent and culture. And global technology, museology, archeology, and the art and antiquities market infuse mainstream heritage practice and precept into every tribal group. "Traditional" cultures are willy-nilly riddled with Western capitalistic individualism, along with antithetical Western notions of authenticity.(14)
Given these caveats, can it be authentic to rebuild or to replace what has ceased to be functional? Can it be authentic to preserve a designed or a vernacular landscape? In what sense can rehabilitation and adaptive reuse be authentic? Should previous alterations, no longer deemed authentic in terms of the original, be expunged or retained as part of an authentic history of trial and error? Such questions are vital and provocative. But they elicit no definitive answers. Time-bound and culture-bound, authenticity's ever-changing criteria make it defy generalization. And the diverse authenticities we appraise—substance, form, originality, creativity, emulation—are seldom compatible. Their dictates are antithetical and competitive.
Yet we cannot simply select one measure of value and ditch the rest; instead, we must weigh them anew for each case. What we find authentic depends not only on what and where but who is doing the work, who is paying for it, how long it is meant to last, and how it is marketed. Like other conservation values, the criteria of authenticity we choose reflect current views about how yesterday should serve and inform today.
To be sure, historic preservation by its very nature surpasses today's concerns. Our trade conspicuously transcends our lifetimes. We deal with creations begun some time ago, often before our own epoch; we save and interpret them for future generations. Reaching back to precursors long gone and far ahead to successors yet unborn, we find our task made especially arduous by their voiceless absence. Knowing how differently our forebears viewed things, we are forced to acknowledge our own time-bound limitations.
Unlike most of their precursors, today's conservators have lots of good practice but little firm philosophy. But practitioners now aware that there are no eternal truths keep asking for them all the same. They would like to serve the angels, not just their clients and themselves. But the guidance they seek must be or seem specific—explicit and precise answers, if possible quantifiable. And we aim to oblige, sometimes unwisely.
Here's an instance. When I taught conservation and preservation at University College London, I got heritage practitioners in the heat of combat to talk to my students. One day in the mid-1980s the secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) preached William Morris's and John Ruskin's anti-scrape dictum, never to restore or renovate, "Resist all tampering'" leave buildings alone, to age gracefully, save for daily care—an 1877 tenet SPAB members today still had to endorse.(15) "Well, I suppose that's all right for old buildings," said a young architect in my class, "but what about new ones?" "Certainly not," replied the SPAB man; "nothing to do with modern buildings at all." "So," continued my student, "where do you draw the line?" The reply came at once: "1923." Later I asked him how he came up with that date so fast, and why. "I knew he had me," he said; "there was no answer; no old-new line makes sense. But if I didn't come up with a date right away I'd have lost all credibility. So I picked a year long before his birth but not so far back as to seem ancient." Beware the urge to seem explicit.
To be authentic now we can only sing the tune that suits today's angelic choir—our own song, sounding right for our time and place. We cleave to our here-and-now tune in the certain knowledge that posterity will find it out of tune, cloying, or cacophonous, just as our conservation remedies will seem blinkered, crude, or tasteless. All we can hope is that our successors grant we did our clumsy best by our own dim lights.
By our own lights. What are those lights? What seems to me authentically modern is growing awareness of three heritage insights—
1. the past is gone and irretrievable
2. it nonetheless remains vital and essential for our well-being
3. we cannot avoid changing its residues, especially when trying not to.
At first glance, these insights seem at odds. Why care about what's gone? In altering the past, do we not fatally falsify it? Would it not be better to forget it and move on?
Such doubts require closer scrutiny of the vanishing past. Thomas Carlyle, on reading Boswell's life of Johnson, remarked how little survived of their tangible existence—
Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were and are not. Their Life and whole personal Environment has melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street, but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beer-and-ale loving, cock-hatted, pot-bellied Landlord; its rose-faced assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand boys, and watery-mouthed hangers on? Gone! Gone!... The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks that they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all have vanished.... Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain, and these also decaying, were they of adamant.(16) |
So indelibly does Carlyle imprint that scene on our minds that we can scarcely credit its demise. Yet we do accept the past's bleak irrecoverability. And in this we differ from those in earlier epochs, for whom the past remained alive and active.
In medieval times, for example, holy relics and the promised Resurrection embodied the past as a living force. It was a pervasive enduring influence—vital, potent, more often malevolent than benign, above all authoritative. What made relics authentic was what they did, how they performed. They continued to enact miracles. Those that ceased to function lost credibility. An authentic relic kept its ongoing promise.
Science authenticated the survival of a quite different Victorian past. Machine-age wizardry inspired faith that all history, hugely lengthened by geology and paleontology, could be retrieved. A record of all that had happened, even of every thought and memory, was stored in the rocks, in the oceans, in the very air. Nothing was lost. The whole past would in time be revealed, forecast computer inventor Charles Babbage.(17) And total retrieval implied total responsibility. Every malefactor would be held to account for every past misdeed; all sins would haunt their perpetrators.
Babbage's retroactive morality was consonant with pious architects who restored Gothic churches as they should have been built in the first place, given Victorian good sense and skills. For similar ends, the historical novelist Walter Scott and his successors lent verisimilitude to antiquarian lore, making their tales vividly authentic to their readers. And re-enacted medieval tournaments and banquets far eclipsed the splendor of the originals.
Retrieving an imperishable past also shaped approaches to memory, which like artifacts were considered material substances. Memory traces were authentic fossils, potential travelers from infancy. Memories forgotten or repressed persisted in the mind, and would some day be reawakened, via Marcel Proust's madeleines or Sigmund Freud's psychoanalyses. The mind was a permanent storehouse of past experience. One had only to find a way of tapping into it. As late as the 1970s, most psychologists believed that original memories could be retrieved intact.(18)
Few any longer believe it, however. Psychologists now realize that memories are constantly eroded, overlain, subject to ongoing loss and accretion, just as heritage professionals recognize that all historic fabric is mutable and evanescent. Art conservators accept mutability as inevitable; museum keepers turn into curators of ephemera. Revision is the stock-in-trade of heritage stewards. The very elements are mortally unstable, transmuting over time into other isotopes. The dynamic processes of change are now more durably authentic than their transitory products.
But evanescence is a discomfiting, anxiety-laden truth, taken onboard reluctantly if at all. Memory's unaltered permanence remains a firm faith among the general public. And hunger for permanence spurs the nostalgia for simpler times past that lends heritage much of its appeal. Disquieted by uncertainty and evanescence, we become frantic to save traces, record narratives, confirm ancestries. We feel called on to secure past residues against the fragile forgetful future. In contrast to the unreliable shifting present, the past seems securely fixed; that is one reason we prize it for its authenticity. "People want the places they visit, whether museums or parks, to possess authenticity, to be real—and to stay that way," says landscape historian Charles Birnbaum.(19) This is true, above all, of our cherished heritage.
The past remains vital to our utmost being. That dependence is so apparent that the heritage profession tends to take it for granted; preservation needs no justification beyond its economic benefits. Heritage is popular and can be shown to pay. But its social and spiritual benefits are poorly understood. The public is little aware of the crucial role of our inherited makeup and milieus for the habits and the skills that we learn, for our sense of personal and collective identity, for our ambitions and ability to secure a viable future. Heritage underpins and enriches continuities with those who came before and those who will come after us.
The compact between the dead, the living, and the unborn was conceived in the 18th century by Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédistes. It received definitive expressive form in Edmund Burke's tirade against the parricidal French Revolution. It was buttressed with ecological significance by 19th-century conservationists George Perkins Marsh and Gifford Pinchot, lent social context and religious comprehension by Émile Durkheim, and economic validity by Arthur Cecil Pigou and John Maynard Keynes in the early 20th century. Mindful of forebears whose acts and beliefs shaped and supported us, we transmit that trans-generational legacy of care to our heirs, both for their sake and for our own.(20)
Concern to understand and protect the past was initially the province of a few savants, then of a small elite. Renaissance and Enlightenment worthies wrote and took occasional action as self-appointed stewards for all. As popular interest mounted in the 19th century, the lay public came to share its mentors' appreciation of the past. But in recent decades elite and popular concerns have more and more diverged. For all today's indiscriminate nostalgia, for all the evocations of yesteryears in film and television, for all the roots and re-enactments and retro styles, for all the obeisance to ancestral claims in heritage and identity politics, the historically informed past has become tabula rasa to most.
The public throngs historic sites and heritage tours. But much on show is shallow entertainment, lacking historical context. We engage a public whose collective memory fades and abbreviates, whose desires are imperiously immediate, and whose tolerance for learning is curtailed. It is imperative for heritage stewards to demonstrate that the past is not a frill or an extra, to be enjoyed or dispensed with on impulse. We need to remind ourselves so as to persuade others that consciously informed use of heritage is essential to civilized life. Previous rationales for transcending the present require renewal for our own all-too oblivious times.
Yet everything done to the past, even mere contemplation, alters memories and residues, dooming many to oblivion. And loving protection can be even more lethal than benign neglect. That has always been the past's fate. Until lately, people were less aware or more tolerant of such change. Among medieval Europeans reworking the past was normal; things outworn were renewed or replaced for present purposes. Renovations, not ruins, were authentic. Rights to land or rule were affirmed not by old parchments but by new charters contrived to appear familiar, hence authentic, to contemporary eyes.
In art as in architecture, ruinations of time and misfortune were routinely repaired. Sacred relics apart, integrity inhered in wholeness. Broken statues and damaged buildings became admirable by being restored to entirety. Few cared if an arm or a leg was original or a torso bore its true head; authenticity meant completion. Only in the late 18th century did wholeness succumb to the contrary cult of fragments and ruins. Erosive and accretive stains of time, patinas natural or contrived, now lent beauty and truth to residues, including the romantic residues of life itself. To be authentic, an object, a structure, or a landscape must be truncated or fragmented.
In contrast, 19th-century conservators "restored" venerable structures and traditions to what they ought ideally to have been. Authenticity meant replacing defective original remnants with modern realizations of the spirit of antiquity. Anti-scrape advocates altered the principles of restorers more than the practices; most who claimed to respect original works were, consciously or not, beautifying, antiquating, or modernizing them, Not until the mid-20th century, in most of the arts, did improving the past give way to archeological exactitude, a scholarly purism that deplored tampering with what was original. Honest authenticity now came to mean intervening as little as possible and making manifest every unavoidable alteration, even to the sacrifice of visual integrity.
That their remade or remaindered past was authentically correct has been the fond faith of each successive conservation policy in turn. From this common delusion it would be folly to think that we ourselves are exempt. Yet recognition now dawns that tampering with the past is inescapable, its outcome neither true nor false, right nor wrong, but a matter of choice and chance. Not even God, it is said, can change the past; but we alter its residues and reminiscences and records all the time. Nothing can prevent such revisions. Nor is anything wrong with it, so long as we remain aware of them. The past will always seem different from what it initially was, each successive inheritor refashioning it in an up-to-date guise.
Flawed by present angst and ignorance, our remade past is soon shown up as defective. But imperfection is no longer the disappointment it used to be. Most propitious in heritage today is our ready admission that we never get things totally, eternally right. Our generation openly admits fallibility. And humility helps free us from the hubris of arrogant and self-defeating perfectionism.
Fallible ourselves, we become more tolerant of precursors whose own errors still bedevil us. For even long-discredited criteria of conservation remain active agents in the present. The past survives not only in things we safeguard and steward, but in outworn concepts of preservation and authenticity. Fossil ideas remain embedded in the public mind and mood. Old authenticities live on to shame modern rectitude. The British aristocracy inveighs against the marketing of "fake" titles, while modernity makes every title essentially fake. The Catholic Church denounces The Da Vinci Code as a fiction that defames its own historically authentic narrative.(21) Yet, modern religious exegesis disavows empirical authentication. Chemical dating of the Turin Shroud is no longer supposed to shore up scriptural truth. Yet some of the faithful still hunger for science to confirm religion.
Acknowledging that our own work is inherently imperfect, incomplete, and inconsistent, we reckon more readily with other inconsistencies. Conflicts among viewpoints past and present, traditional and cutting edge, declared and concealed, compromise all authentic ideals. "How Real Is that Ruin? Don't Ask, the Locals Say" headlined the story on an Inca temple site in Chucuito, Peru, housing dubiously ancient stone posts, which has spawned lucrative tourism. It was not the contrivance of antiquity, though, that distressed one visitor, but the absence of hype: "You do wonder if it is historical, considering there isn't even a signpost."(22) Only a declared certificate would make the site authentic. Signposts serve as official imprimaturs. Chucuito is like many, if not most, ruins partly fake, partly contrived, partly recent, partly imaginary but, above all, seemingly authentic when so labeled.
Much once thought authentic now seems strange, even risible. And present criteria of authenticity will be as ephemeral as the rest. Our successors will deem them self-serving, biased by our blinkered gaze, even ludicrous. It would be helpful to have a museum of authenticity. Let us celebrate our tolerance for ambiguity by showing what (and explaining why) previous folk held authentic—saintly relics, invented medieval charters and pedigrees, neoclassical and neogothic restorations—alongside our own strange follies.
A striking parallel in the arts is the early music revival, long given to weird authenticities. Some devotees claimed to make pre-classical music as it had been, others as it had been imagined. But they hotly disputed what mattered most—authentic notation, original instruments, performance style, composers' intention, audience expectations. All were painstakingly recreated in period recitals that were heavy on history but manifestly unable to replicate much of the past. Authentic fidelity would have required true castrati, gelded for the purpose in childhood, and skilled boy sopranos, with voices still unbroken at 16, yet mature enough both to master the complexities of early music and to be "capable of entering into the spiritual world of their forebears five centuries ago."(23)
Early music facsimiles of ancient instruments often proved ill-suited to the modern concert stage. Some could scarcely be heard; others demanded discordant tuning or bowing. A prime instance of such pitfalls was the Vega bow, constructed in the 1950s to play three or four notes at once, as notated for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach. Since this could not be done with a modern or baroque bow, historical purists assumed Bach must have used something else, and Knud Vestergaard "reconstructed" it. His bow had a giant convex arch, a thick ribbon of hair, and a thumb-operated tension adjusting mechanism. Played with the Vega bow, the chaconne of Bach's D minor partita sounded like an organ or an accordion, depriving the broken chords of their rhythmic and expressive dynamism. That "no such bow ever existed in Bach's day…is a reminder of how the zealousness for historical accuracy can lead [to] sheer fantasy."(24)
However exhaustive and accurate their expertise, early music professionals came to realize that music made centuries ago could never be experienced as it was initially. No ears that have heard a Verdi opera can hear a Monteverdi opera as 17th-century people did; subsequent auditory experience profoundly alters listener expectations.
The point applies as much to the ocular as to the aural landscape. No eyes that have seen Frank Gehry's buildings can ever see ancient or Renaissance architecture in the way anyone did at the time, or for long after, because all the new scenes since then have accustomed us to anticipate quite other optical experiences. "The only way to respect the past," writes a disciple of Le Corbusier, "is to be authentically modern…with the technology and aesthetic sensibility of today."(25) Indeed, we cannot escape today's Zeitgeist and the ever-changing authenticities it entails.
The past, from which we learn and benefit so much, is in one sense truly old, in another altogether new. The old is irretrievable. But its sounds and sights, its artifacts and insights, continue to instruct and amaze our new eyes, new ears, new minds. These time-travel sorties immeasurably enhance our lives. Let us relish rather than regret being aware, unlike our self-confident forerunners, that what we do is in some ways wrong, in most ways imperfect, and in all ways ephemeral.
About the Author
David Lowenthal is author of many books and articles on cultural heritage, including The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998) and The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985), both Cambridge University Press.
Notes
1. This essay is based on a keynote address presented at the Fifth National Forum on Historic Preservation Practice ("A Critical Look at Authenticity and Historic Preservation") held March 23-25, 2006, at Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland.
2. Michael Crichton, Timeline (New York, NY: Knopf, 1999), 436.
3. David Lowenthal, "Is Wilderness 'Paradise enow'? Images of Nature in America," Columbia University Forum 7 (1964): 34-40; "Daniel Boone Is Dead," Natural History 57 no. 7 (1968): 8-16, 64-67; "The Environmental Crusade," Landscape Architecture 60 (1970): 290-96.
4. David Lowenthal, "Art and Authenticity," in World Art: Themes of Unity in Diversity, ed. Irving Lavin, 26th International Congress of the History of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 3: 843-47; The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5. David Lowenthal, "Forging the Past," Apollo 131 no. 337 (March 1990): 152-57; "Authenticity? The Dogma of Self Delusion," in Fake? The Art of Deception, ed. Mark Jones (London, England: British Museum Press, 1992), 184-92.
6. David Lowenthal, "Criteria of Authenticity," in Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention, ed. Knut Einar Larsen and Nils Milstein (Oslo, Norway: Riksantikvaren, 1994), 35-64; "Changing Criteria of Authenticity," in Nara Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention: Proceedings, ed. Knut Einar Larsen (Paris, France: UNESCO World Heritage Center, 1995), 121-35.
7. Maureen Dowd, "Oprah's Bunk Club," New York Times, January 28, 2006, A27.
8. Alex Danchev, review of Frank Wynne, I Was Vermeer (2006), Times Literary Supplement, January 9, 2007, 32.
9. David Lowenthal, "Authenticity: Rock of Faith or Quicksand Quagmire?" Conservation: Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 14 no. 3 (December 1999): 5-8.
10. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chapter 7.
11. Miguel Angel Corzo, ed., Mortality/Immortality: The Legacy of 20th-Century Art (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Conservation Institute, 1999); David Lowenthal, "Archival Perils: An Historian's Plaint," Archives, 31 no. 114 (2006): 49-75.
12. David Lowenthal, "Why Sanctions Seldom Work: Reflections on Cultural Property Internationalism," International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 391-421.
13. Gwyneira Isaac, lecture, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, May 2006.
14. Lowenthal, "Why Sanctions Seldom Work," 406-9; Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York, NY: Norton, 2006).
15. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 278-80.
16. Thomas Carlyle, "Boswell's Life of Johnson" (1832), in Works, Ashburton edition (London, England: Chapman & Hall, 1885-1888), 16: 227.
17. Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment, 2nd edition [1838] (London, England: Frank Cass, 1967), 112-15.
18. Elizabeth F. and Geoffrey R. Loftus, "On the Permanence of Stored Information in the Human Brain," American Psychologist 35 (1980): 409-20.
19. Charles Birnbaum, "In Defense of Open Space," Preservation (September-October 2005): 8.
20. David Lowenthal, "Stewarding the Future," CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 2 no. 2 (summer 2005): 6-25; idem, "The Past of the Future: From the Foreign to the Undiscovered Country," in Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (London, England: Routledge, 2007), 205-19.
21. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2003).
22. Luke Jerrod Kummer, New York Times, March 21, 2006.
23. David Lowenthal, "From Harmony of the Spheres to National Anthem: Reflections on Musical Heritage," GeoJournal 65 (2006): 3-15; Richard Taruskin, "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past," in Authenticity and Early Music, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1988), 137-207, at 144.
24. Jeremy Eichler, "The Bow of Our Dreams? Not Quite," New York Times, August 10, 2003.
25. Mario Botta, quoted in "Making Historic Houses New Again," International Herald Tribune, July 6, 2005, 5.