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2) Authenticity as tradition, the way it's always been done. Closely related to authenticity as purity, this idea is grounded in custom rather than claims of fundamental reality. Ethnic styles, such as kente cloth or bindi, are authentic if worn by people from the right ethnic group, inauthentic if adopted by outsiders. Authentic blues singers are "old black men from the Mississippi Delta," not young white women on NPR. Wood tables are authentic; Formica tables are not. Masonry bearing walls are authentic; a decorative masonry façade is not. When classicist architect Léon Krier writes that "if museums look like factories and churches like industrial warehouses, a basic value of the state is in crisis," he is invoking this idea of authentic form. Surfaces have meanings fixed by tradition.

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