I've been thinking a lot about why I don't like houses or furniture, or anything really, that's new but made to look old, furniture that's "distressed" to make it look weathered, wood floors banged up with a hammer so they look worn.
There is something about this that strikes me as untrue, and I realized what it was when I came across this paragraph in Bayles and Orland's book, Art & Fear. They said,
Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists – people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a German shepherd at a hundred feet – casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat except a Greek fisherman.
When what looks old really is old, its meaning is embodied, not referenced - and trying to borrow the power of 'old' across space and time can only be referential; it isn't what it is.
If you can't borrow power across space and time then, what's left but to discover your own and embody its meaning yourself?