Authenticity, authentication and experiential authenticity: telling stories in museums

This article examines how different types of authenticity and authentication work together to inspire museum stories, and personal identification with them, in ways that encourage experiential authenticity. It begins by outlining conceptions of object and existential authenticity and demonstrating how they are bound up with processes of hot and cool authentication. I argue that museums deploy all of these mechanisms to encourage experiences which visitors perceive as authentic. This perspective supports a concept of ‘experiential authenticity’ which connotes the belief and sensations of having experienced something genuine and real. This concept’s value is illustrated by examining storytelling in Anne Frank House. Key museum stories are outlined before exploring how different forms, and degrees, of authenticity and authentication work together to enlist visitor imaginations in the storytelling process and to thereby inspire personal identification as well as embodied connections with them. Four key mechanisms for telling stories are analysed (objects, texts, photographs and videos), and their combined capacity to cultivate experiential authenticity is demonstrated. This is important because experiential authenticity heightens visitor receptivity to museum stories, and is thus both a source and agent of power.