Pop's Authenticity Hang-Up: Who's to blame, progressives or reactionaries?

I've been disposed to agree with Yuval Taylor (from yesterday) since reading Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, but I'm a little taken aback that he wants to blame pop's preoccupation with authenticity on conservatism:

My poker buddy Mark Weinberg turned me onto this quote from New Republic cultural honcho Leon Wieseltier:

Authenticity is a paltry standard by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics. Authenticity is a measure of provenance, and provenance has nothing to do with substance. An idea may be ours and still be false. A work of art may be ours and still be ugly. A politics may be ours and still be evil.

Authenticity is a reactionary ideal. And speaking strictly, it is an anti-ideal. It says: what has been is what must be. It is the idolatry of origins.

While I think Wieseltier is mostly right, he's wrong about a few things. First, provenance does inform substance. You cannot divorce substance from provenance, or else you end up with free-floating substance—an idea that has its attractions (remember the New Criticism?), but involves decontextualizing things from their origins. Second, authenticity is a conservative ideal, but not a reactionary one. The real reactionaries out there may pay lip service to authenticity, but their ideologies usually depend on deliberately manufactured untruths—or inauthenticities, to coin a word. Reactionaries are motivated by ideals, and, as Wieseltier rightly points out, authenticity is an anti-ideal.

I would modify Wieseltier's thought as follows:

Authenticity is only one of several standards by which to appraise an idea or a work of art or a politics, and should not be the beginning and end of any such appraisal. It is at heart a conservative notion, one opposed to ideology, for it says: what has been, or what really is, is what should be. It is the idolatry of origins.

Yes, but: bubblegum, which as we know is the most reactionary genre of all time, is also the most unapologetically inauthentic.

For another thing, cultural authenticity may be a conservative value (see: Southern rock), but personal authenticity is much more liberal. (Taylor explains the difference here.) The Left has a powerful attachment to "being true to yourself"; that's why they're skeptical of imposed cultural structures that diminish personal authenticity, i.e. gender roles, strict religious observance, etc. So don't blame the Right for the impossible rules of punk rock. ("The only winning move is not to play...")