Commodities, Consumption, and Connoisseurship: Shaw’s Critique of Authenticity in Modernity

This article examines Shaw’s critique of authenticity in modernity during the first decades of the twentieth century, a period that witnessed the commodification of the “authentic” artifact or experience. By scrutinizing the material things Shaw purchased and the artistic groups he supported, we enter a Shavian world of paradoxes, contradictions, and unresolved tensions. In many ways these embodied the condition of modernity itself: the site of intersection among art, aesthetics, commodities, and commerce where the categories of genuine and fake are rendered unstable. Shaw criticized the idea of authenticity as the expression of fundamental “truths”—particularly the notion that certain aspects of culture existed apart from the commercial world. Drawing on recent work by Elizabeth Outka, his complex relationship to the “commodifed authentic” is explored in prefaces, plays, and other writings with specific reference to material and visual culture. Finally, this essay focuses on various mass-produced images of the playwright. The work of the critic Walter Benjamin provides the backdrop to a discussion of Shaw’s ideas on art, photography and its reproducibility.