The quoted part reminds me of what's known as 'staged authenticity' in tourism studies. "Dean MacCannell formulates his theory of modern tourism and approaches

The quoted part reminds me of what's known as 'staged authenticity' in tourism studies. "Dean MacCannell formulates his theory of modern tourism and approaches the question of authenticity in The Tourist. He uses the concept of staged authenticity to explain the tourist experience; people know what they are experiencing is not real and authentic but feel content with it anyway. According to MacCannell, staged authenticity is authenticity’s negation, an attempt to move beyond the front-back binary made famous by Erving Goffman, very much similar to what Edward Bruner, also hoping to transcend such binaries as authentic – inauthentic and front – back, wrote in Culture on tour. To Goffman, all social action is play, and he uses theater as an analogy when he explains how people will alter their social roles according to their position (front or back) on the stage. The idea of people necessarily withholding some aspects of their personality will ultimately lead to a position where the tourist is always confronted with a staged play, never allowed backstage to experience authenticity. Bruner and MacCannell have, however, different ideas about what is to be found backstage. For MacCannell the back is a place where secrets are only popularly thought to be kept but, in fact, do not exist. While MacCannell explicitly denies the possibility of authenticity residing in the back regions, Bruner stated that MacCannell believes there is always true and real at the back."