Getting Real About the Real
Sales gimmicks have been around for as long as we’ve had marketplaces. The term gimmick shows up in the United States sometime around the 1920s, and although lexicographers aren’t sure where it came from, it may have had some connection to the word ‘magic.’ Nowadays it just means a trick or device intended to attract business or attention. Gimmicks obscure, hide, re-frame, dissemble, and redirect the reality of what a potential consumer encounters.
Claims of authenticity and the real are two such gimmicks that marketers have adopted voraciously in an effort to attract business or attention over the last couple of decades. Of course, neither authenticity or the real are gimmicks in and of themselves—quite the opposite in fact—but their cooption has created a glut of products, services, spaces, and so on that depend on an obscuration and redirection that would make any modern-day Svengali proud.
The real and the authentic (the same thing, in fact) do more than offer a patina of experience and connection to things we might want to buy or build, they represent an opportunity to participate in, and join, a lineage of human creativity and production that stretches backwards and forwards through the present.
When we make the real just a sales tool or a throw-away marketing line, we run the risk not only of being seen as foolish and thieving, but also as a contributor to the dilution and misapprehension of those experiences and traditions that offer the sort of creative and aesthetic diversity that is essential for a vibrant cultural, social, and economic life.
The motif books of the late 19C and early 20C allowed designers to grab designs from everything from tattoos to sarcophagi from almost every culture around the world. These were, of course, wildly misappropriated as a form of exoticism and gimmickry in a way that makes our contemporary eyes twitch. But, our own practices aren’t too far away from this, just better disguised.
To honor the real—in our own world of global influences—is to be knowledgeable about what it is that we are claiming about what influences us and its relationship to what is truly real. We cannot take a collection of colors, lines, and configurations and lay claim to a Native American weaving tradition. Nor, can we minimalize colors, patterns, and configurations and lay claim to a Nordic aesthetic. That’s how plunder works—stolen marbles underwriting a fantasy of empire.
To honor the real—and to incorporate the real into products, and services, and places—is to engage with history and nuance. It is considerably more difficult than pillage. But the results are profound: a continuing evolution and distribution of ideas, concepts, and ways of seeing the world that is part of our collective human experience as well as our own sense of self, our place in the world, and our desire to be part of something bigger. And real. And lasting.
—Peter
