Contest Winner!

So I had a contest inviting people to submit pictures, links, stories, anecdotes or anything else that reeks of the authenticity hoax. I got lots of great submissions and it was hard deciding on the winner. But here goes:

Third place: Roger Collier  sent me a link to a story in the New York Times (where else?).  "The piece," Roger writes,  "is about reality TV contestants and how some, like American Idol singers, can be open about their ambitions (to be famous) while others, like Bachelor competitors, must surpress their ambitions (to be famous) and pretend to be looking for "love."":

Unlike contestants on Fox's American Idol, who openly express a desire to be pop stars, people who advance on “The Bachelor” have to dissemble their ambitions. They must pull off an acting trick, akin to one required of contestants on the old find-the-liar game show “To Tell the Truth.” They’re not on this reality show to promote themselves, which they must agree (or risk banishment) is despicable; they’re on the show to “find love,” which they must earnestly profess (or risk banishment) is noble. This demand on the players brings to mind Abigail Cheever’s fascinating new book, “Real Phonies,” about the American drama of personal authenticity.

Second place: Sean Stockholm sent this great video for Fender "Road Worn" guitars. Why play and tour for forty years to get your guitar looking and feeling distressed and broken in? Fender will add "authentic aging to the hardware" to make it look like all you weekend rockers out there look like you've been kicking out the jams since the sixties.

First place: Ultimately, no one could beat Edward Behr's argument in Salon about the need for something to replace "organic" as a way of defining quality in agriculture, in a way that can't be co-opted by corporations. He suggests -- get this -- the label, "authentic". How do you guarantee authenticity? "To have an "authentic" label, food would have to be sold directly by the person or family who grew it -- no middleman."

Where to begin? You could write a whole book about how brainless this is. A free copy of The Authenticity Hoax goes to Peter Snyder, who sent me the link. Thanks to everyone who sent me stuff, sorry if I haven't had a chance to properly reply yet.