The phrase "a certain artifice" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to refer to a specific type of cleverness or trickery in a situation, often implying a degree of manipulation or deceit.
Example: "The magician's performance was filled with a certain artifice that left the audience in awe."
Alternatives: "a particular trickery" or "a specific cunning".
A certain amount of artifice is welcome when making art about beautiful children in idyllic scenarios.
As Ellen points out in one of her cheery lectures, a certain level of artifice plays an ineradicable role in the lives of those suffering millions in the outside world too, as they busily idealize their lives for the consumption of their Facebook friends.
She clearly loves a certain kind of artifice – the unfettered costumes, the wild make-up looks – but in conversation, she's immensely down-to-earth and natural, veering from giggly girlishness as she talks about her upcoming wedding to a frank elaboration of the most recent musical turn taken by Gossip, the band she has fronted since its formation in 1999.
Van Aelst's critics regularly noted a certain bipolarity in his paintings: while they were manifestly objects of extraordinary artifice, the viewer experiences the things they depict as uncannily present, as if they were hallucinated.
The first intention was to prescribe a certain end to their life, and the inner economy of these machines was devised thus with such an artifice that they cannot exercise their functions but for a given lapse of time, after which death must come.
Lest all the artifice of breed descriptions, chemistry-set jargon and ingredient rebranding in the posher kind of restaurant make a certain kind of diner suspicious, a parallel recent trend is the reassuring adjective "proper".
Washington is full of the drama and acting and artifice that comprise the most fundamental definition of theatre: the art of convincing people that you feel a certain way about something.
He remains in a certain sense detached from the action, so that the story itself can be viewed and admired as a work of pure artifice.
For a certain kind of woman, fingernails — lacquered and lengthened to alarming proportions — have lately become a way to self-consciously embrace feminine artifice in the name of feminist authenticity.
So the wirework is limited, and also artificial, but, like other artifices — head voices in opera, point work in ballet — it can create a poetic image, and give things a certain lilt and unexpectedness.
