 an idea that goes back to early anthropological work by Frazer (1890 [1994]) and others. As the examples just given indicate, the idea that a person’s essence is transferable to an object does not depend on the object’s aesthetic merits, and this severely limits the usefulness of this idea in explaining the role of authenticity in the arts (see, however, Korsmeyer 2019 where it is argued that genuineness is itself an aesthetic property). Bloom and colleagues stress the role of physical contact in the contagion process: “An original Picasso may be valuable because Picasso actually touched it” (Newman &amp; Bloom 2012: 3). But Picasso may have got no closer than a brush length from Guernica, a picture likely to command higher art-world respect (and higher prices) than a restaurant napkin sketch he then wiped his hands on. However, a more general and perhaps rather vague sense of “closeness” to the artist and their act of making does seem to be explanatory of some art-world practices, such as a preference for lower numbered (and hence earlier) prints even where there is no decline in quality across later ones (Smith, Newman, &amp; Dhar 2016).