What is genuine art?

Authenticity of Process

• Even if the materials or references are borrowed, the artist’s way of engaging them—honestly, reflectively, even painfully—can produce something genuinely expressive.

• Kandinsky, Pollock, or Joan Mitchell: while abstract, they tried to reach something deeply real—through the unconscious, gesture, or intensity.

The genuine may lie in how the artist confronts their own condition, even if their tools are inherited.

Regarding Jung’s individuation stage, Art can be genuine when: a) it arises from deep psychic expressions of necessity b) honestly reflects a stage in one’s inner journey.

Non-representational art often becomes the language of the unconscious: a symbolic process rather than a literal one and individuation can make art genuine, because it reflects an internal wholeness or struggle, not just a style or surface.

But For Adorno, art is genuine when it refuses to reconcile with society’s false narratives, usually originating in the art marketplace… for in that arena reification occurs, and too often, the exchange value is all that is present. There is an institutional tendency towards conformity, homogeneity, and what soon becomes mediocrity; this occurs when the art is commodified, only to satisfying the consumer’s appetite for an object to be owned.