"All Art Is a Lie"
 

“All art is a lie, insofar as truth is defined by the Supreme Court. After all, Picasso's goat isn't a goat. Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact?”

--Ned Rorem (1999)

At a cocktail reception for my university exchange program to a famous old Tokyo university, a Japanese professor approached me through the crowd and launched into a word-for-word recitation of the foreword to The Portrait of Dorian Gray. While the passage was familiar to me, the only phrase I could recall verbatim was the final line, which we intoned in unison:

"All art is quite useless."

Picasso would have been a liar if he'd maintained that his goat actually was a goat - but I don't think he did. Artists hardly ever deal in facts.

Ned Rorem is a retard.

Wow, I am just so eloquent.

Maybe an artist is, at times, delusional. Legally, to be lying you have to be aware that what you are saying is not true. When creating a work of art you're expressing yourself which can take whatever result you want. Sometimes the art will tell the truth in an empirical sense and sometimes it won't.

I think most Impressionists were just short-sighted.

:lol:

Or maybe just high on Absinthe.

I think all artists are impressionists, they just decide to look at different perspectives. TV is a lie, not art, IMO.

Romy

Exactly. And I think that was Ned Rorem's point, expressed facetiously. Wasn't it Godard who said film is Truth 24 times a second?

Welcome back, by the way! :wavey:

Thanks David, but I've never been away really, just too busy. :)

Romy