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Around 1990 I would often engage in heated discussions with my two close friends and fellow musicians about art and its revelatory potential. They both defended serious art and its truth content. I never quite got what that might mean, and still have some problems with the concept. One way to pose this thesis is that serious or high art is able to convey truth, but entertainment or light art is not. At the time, I wasn't in favour of elitist conceptions of art that would debase popular expressions and entertainment. It definitely wasn't about any kind of revulsion against "high art" – I enjoyed Tarkovskij, Boulez, and Joyce for good measure. The idea of truth in art seems to involve the romantic notion of the artist as visionary, as someone who is better equipped to see certain things clearly, which the rest of us would only be able to discover through the work of art.
Today it is perhaps outmoded to speak of truth in art, or at least less common than it once used to be. So even though I might be beating a dead horse, I'll be doing so in the awareness that someone might try to resurrect it. Postmodernism cast doubt on objective truth, preferring the notion of social construction, and as its mindset infused art there were one reason less to take its truth seriously. Although I don't subscribe to postmodern relativism, I have other contentions with the thesis of truth in art.
Heidegger's essay on the origin of the work of art is a famous example where truth is related to art. Significantly, Heidegger's notion of truth goes back to the greek concept of aletheia, rougly translated as unconceilment or uncovering. Derrida's La verité en peinture engages with Heidegger and his example of a pair of shoes in a van Gogh painting. The shoelaces run through the text and it all becomes quite entangled. I'll refrain from trying to summarise Derrida's point, if he has any. (The essay, titled Restitutions, tries to argue against Meyer Schapiro who thought he had found evidence that the shoes belonged to van Gogh himself, not to a peasant, as Heidegger had suggested. Is this an important question to quibble about? The original shoes in the painting, one of the several shoe paintings in fact, must have belonged to someone, but does it really matter whose shoes they were?)
A common conception of truth regards it as a relation or correspondence between statements or beliefs and facts in the world. And that causes trouble for the view that art conveys truth.
For art to be true according to the correspondence theory it would have to have language character, it would have to "say something" or express something. Most obviously this is the case in literature, although the words of a novel are not necessarily identical to its message. Artforms such as theatre, film, and some examples of visual art also come close to the semantic aspect of language, whereas instrumental music and abstract art don't. Music may have much in common with prosody, it is a form in time as is spoken language, even if it lacks semantic reference. Adorno's view is that all art possesses language character.
In order to argue that music and abstract art can have any truth content, the correspondence theory would have to be metaphorically extended to allow it to cover these cases. Or one could try a different truth theory.
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One of the most over-used clickbait titles takes the form:
The TRUTH about X
(invariably capitalised, of course), and it is just about synonymous with the other over-used formula, "10 things you didn't know about X." If you fall for the temptation, the video or article reveals itself to be the propaganda message of some nutcase who thought you didn't already know those ten things, or that you were misled into false beliefs about this X (and I'm certainly not referring to a brand name; the truth about the letter X is that in the old days it used to stand for an "unknown entity" in algebra or wider discourse).
I often get a similar feeling from the hyped notion of truth in art. However, in the philosophy of art it is rare for anyone to be specific by means of clear definitions. A few carefully selected examples might be provided, but the reader would have to agree about their adequacy and, more importantly, counter-examples that would blow the claim to pieces are silently ignored. Usually, one is left with a handwaving argument about the value of art, and of high art in particular. Vattimo's book, Art's Claim to Truth, is sparse on examples and draws heavily on Heidegger and Gadamer. He is one of the few who have tried to follow this line of thought in recent times. There are a few interesting remarks in the book, but the English translation is a pain to read. It should have been sent to a copy editor before publishing.
An article by Andy Hamilton is an exception to the predominant handwaving, as he makes a case for truth in art and tries to respond to the most common objections. The trouble with the correspondence theory and its reliance on language character is one strong argument against the thesis that art may be a carrier of truth. The evasion from this critique either consists in showing that all art possesses language character, or the notion of truth is modified in some vague sense so as to fit the arts. There is another powerful critique on ideological grounds. The example Hamilton discusses comes from eighteenth century English landscape painting by Constable and Gainsborough, just around the time when artistic autonomy was beginning to emerge. Thus writes the Guardian in 1713:
...truth well painted will certainly please the imagination; but it is sometimes convenient not to discover the whole truth, but that part which only is delightful ...
And to please the patrons whose walls were to be decorated with these paintings, subjects such as the misery of poor peasants had to be handled cautiously if not completely avoided. The ideological argument against truth in painting thus holds that the artists aren't really sufficiently autonomous to be able to depict the truth, because they remain beholden to their patrons. This argument can be made still today as artists either have to sell on the commercial market or eke out a living in cooperation with the contemporary art institutions, which also impose some restrictions on subject matter.
However, truth in art also faces a problem of interpretation. Two spectators may interpret the same painting in widely different ways. One might call in the painter as arbiter, although that isn't always possible, nor even desirable. Abstract painters like Mondrian and Kandinsky referred to a spiritual truth in their works, but do we have to take them literally? The thesis of truth in art should have something to say about conflicting interpretations and valuations of the same work. Either it sets a standard of an objective truth content and denounces some opinions as wrong, or it has to admit that truth is subjective.
Needless to say, this is a complex topic. If you have thoughts on it I'd be curious to hear them.