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Christine Boyer_Times Square: Dead or Alive?

One wonders if the question posed within the title of this article could not restated as Authenticity: Dead or Alive? Boyer’s discussion deals largely with questions surrounding the notion of authenticity, specifically as understood through Times Square, the tourist epicenter of Manhattan. Many contemporary cultural critics, she states, “blame consumers and tourists for corrupting the real experience of Times Square and trivializing the place for they have emptied it of meaning and settled too easily for stereotypical replacements and illusionary simulations.” But what is the ‘real’ experience of Times Square; what is its authentic nature, its unique reality, its inherent meaning? I tend to align myself with Boyer’s position regarding such statements and beliefs as those outlined above; it is extremely difficult to pin down authenticity in contemporary culture. Perhaps it is meaningless to judge anything against some traditional notion of authenticity, some nostalgic entity from a previous time because concepts such as authenticity, reality, and meaning, have come to be recognized as subjective constructs in postmodern culture. Simply because a select group of individuals feels that something has lost its authenticity, its meaning, or its value does not mean that it has; it has simply lost it for that group of individuals.

Besides, with specific regard to the example of Times Square, what could be a more bona fide representation than its digital/electronic-mass-media-pop-culture driven self? What “more authentic experience would correct (Times Square’s) false illusion and what deeper historical meaning (could) its signs and symbols reference” as Boyer poignantly states? Perhaps Times Square, as it exists today, is a physical manifestation of an authentic postmodern environment and experience? Not inherently authentic in so far as it conforms to its own original (its referent) but authentic in terms of people’s experience of it and relation to it. Times Square may be an alternate reality and a simulated environment, but so is the vast majority of our entire hyper-technological culture. Perhaps we should accept it on this basis rather than pessimistically lamenting its demise and seeking to return it to a state of authenticity, seeking to destroy its current authenticity even. Times Square has its own new-age stroboscopic liveliness and energy, different but not dissimilar from that which it had in the 1930’s. New York is and has always been very much a culture of spectacle and of delirium. Times Square, currently and most likely well into the future, will remain a definitive place that is an up-to-date rendering of the culture we exist within, and I believe in this way, will always remain authentic.