If I put this photo here, those who follow me because they are interested in music might connect it with the news of the new album by Strokes. Almost everyone else will think of an old Marlboro ad with cowboys on the frontier: and in fact the shot comes from a Marlboro Man campaign. But those who know photography and contemporary art (not me) know that it is a work “by” Richard Prince, infamous precisely for having taken photos-of-photos of these advertisements, causing no small scandal and generating endless discussions about the very meaning of authorship.

There would be a lot to say about an album arriving with this image, in this historical phase of mechanized plagiarism that makes us suspect that everything is fake or at least not original. And it makes us search for authenticity in desperate and disordered ways.

Even The Strokes had been considered almost universally, even by non-detractors, as uninventive and unoriginal: the proponents of a revival (which – ironically – now has its own indie sleaze revival), the leather-jacketed heroes of a cynical and desperate phase of human history, in which we began to seriously convince ourselves that the best was over. But if everything has already been said and nothing is truly original, does present art still have something to say? Or are we forced to live in an endless loop of sequels, reboots, slop?

I'm not an expert in photography, but if I had to say something about Prince's “work”, it's that even behind the copy of a copy, there is an object. That even in our separation from the frontier, through two filters (that of the original photographer, and of the photographer-of-the-photographer) a part of us yearns for that real world that the image conveys even within the advertising frame, which our eye arbitrarily cuts out and spits out, aspiring to the object more than the context. In the umpteenth iteration of what we see, read, listen to, there is always a thing, and as listeners/readers/viewers, we lean towards that thing. (Provided it is a human representation, I might add).

Reality is there and waiting for us, if only we take a step forward to meet it. Thirty years ago, reality bit us (Reality Bites, the original title of the film known in Italy as Giovani, carini e disoccupati). Thirty years later, the teeth have fallen out, but Reality Awaits. The title of The Strokes' new album, precisely.