Authentic Fake Art

I use to catch a certain amount of grief for loving The Monkees. I've never been too concerned about it. I like what I like and while I do enjoy explaining why it ultimately comes down to very personalized feelings, and while concrete qualities can be extracted from them they still exist mainly in the abstract. The biggest argument against The Monkees was that they were fakes. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor have just come out with Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity In Popular Music (ISBN 0571226590) and since I haven't read it yet I'll just make like the character Tom from Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and give you a link to critic Jeff Sharlet's review at New Statesman. Myself, I think the question shuldn't be one of authentic versus false, but perhaps one of artifice versus commerce and their intertwining.