Truth

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(Editor’s note: This is the third installment of an occasional series of essays attempting to relate the transcendentals (beauty; goodness; truth) and the three great virtues (faith; hope; love) to the discipline of art criticism. The first and second installments of the series can be found here and here. It must be emphasized that the completion of the six-part series remains in doubt.)

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I bought this really nice used laptop on Facebook Marketplace recently. I’d been thinking about it for a while and finally I made an offer to the seller, which he refused; but I was afraid it would sell so I bought it anyway. Probably paid too much for it—it was, after all, a used laptop—but there was something about it that I liked. I think it’s the peculiar purplish sheen of the custom metal case, or maybe some of the stickers on it: a lot of old random stickers from before the days of Temu and AI-generated sticker packs, which are so ugly; this was decorated back when your sticker collection was a curated expression of your true self . . . actually I don’t want to talk about what it looked like. The point is, I had been using it for a while and it was perfect except the CD drive wouldn’t open. It didn’t bother me because who uses optical media anymore these days anyway? I was mainly using it for writing. So: I was getting ready to go out of town for Christmas and I was going to bring this laptop with me to do some writing, but first I had to print out my itinerary. And wouldn’t you know, the laptop was stuck shut. The little clasp in the front had, I guess, finally gotten pressed down enough that it broke, and the laptop wouldn’t come open. This was extremely frustrating because I wanted to print my itinerary from the laptop so I wouldn’t have to fumble with my devices while boarding the plane (I like to keep them zipped up in my carry-on bag so I don’t have to worry about them). My Uber was in front and I was getting impatient; in a fit of rage I threw the laptop onto the floor . . . and it opened, but so did the previously-stuck CD drive—and out popped a CD. It was a CDR with the words “VICTORIOUS HERMIT PODCAST SCANS” written in sharpie on it. Weird . . . I brought it with me, of course. The CDR was full of image files of cuneiform tablets. I translated the first few using ChatGPT. Within the limits of how true the result might have been, it appears the tablets are all transcripts of podcast episodes. Episode 1 was some sort of mission statement, introducing the two hosts of the podcast (two social theorists: Amanda Agathina Atrantarnita, who—understandably—goes by “A,” and Beatrice Williams, who goes by “Bea”) and stating that their goal in transcribing them into cuneiform was because they didn’t trust digital media longevity, or something like that. I never really pay too close attention to the intro episodes of podcasts because they’re usually rather pretentious, with all their talk of lofty goals, all the famous guests they’re going to have, and so on—promises which they inevitably break over the course of the podcast, since a good podcast will range all over, not sticking to one subject. The second episode was a discussion of what is meant by the concept of “truth” in the context of art; and though I don’t agree with everything the hosts say I thought the readers of this blog might find it interesting; but I must warn you they do a ton of name-dropping and the podcast really seems more like a brain dump or two friends chatting than any kind of actually well-reasoned argument. Maybe someday I will translate and publish the other episodes, but for now, this one is enough to start us off. Without further ado, then, here you go: an episode of Victorious Hermit Podcast for your reading pleasure.

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A: First we ought to define what is meant by “truth.” In the context of art, what does that word mean?

Bea: Right. The word “truth” can mean the same thing as verisimilitude, which is how many people first think of it. You know—a portrait is a true likeness, and all that. A landscape is considered “true” if it looks real.

A: But that can’t always be the case, because there are some paintings that look real yet obviously could never happen—like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus—

Bea: Right! Or that one by Dalí where his wife is being menaced by two tigers and a gun. That could never happen in real life, but nobody expects it to; is the painting a lie, then? In what way is it “true” or “not true”? I mean, no one is looking at Botticelli’s Venus to determine the correct appearance of the historical Venus!

A: Another meaning of “truth” in art would then have to account for what the painting is saying. Is the painting—however weird of impossible its subject—saying something true about reality?

Bea: That’s where it starts to get really interesting, because lots of pictures that we think are realistic are actually saying something that isn’t exactly true when you think about them closely. My favorite example of this sort of thing is that painting by Luetze of Washington crossing the Delaware. It shows Washington as supremely confident and assertive, resolute . . . but the reality was that he was at his lowest point at that event in the war. Morale had bottomed out and he was seriously considering surrendering to the British. So the emotional content of Leutze’s painting is, when you think of it, kind of a lie.

A: Right. Another example would be all those Thomas Kinkade paintings.

Bea: I was hoping you would bring up Kinkade! His pictures are . . . well, not really truthful, but not really not, either, right?

A: Right. They’re technically competent, they have that realism that we talked about; but there’s some sort of lie going on there. There’s some kind of uncanny off flavor to them.

Bea: But it’s a flavor that many people consider to be a good flavor. He was, after all, the most financially successful painter who ever lived.

A: Kinkade was extremely popular and still continues to be. His pictures are a vision of a world which seems to match up with an ideal world—

Bea: Ideal—that’s a very important word in this context. Because Plato believed the material world that we see isn’t the truth about reality; he talked about the ideas behind the phenomena as being more true, more real, than the phenomena themselves. So if that’s true then maybe Kinkade’s pictures are truer than all that honest, gritty, “realistic” art out there which is trying to portray the current realities of the moment.

A: Kinkade is portraying the truth of the idea of cozy domesticity. And everyone wants to be cozy and comfortable , right?

Bea: It’s just that his idea of “cozy” sure looks a lot like an English country cottage! What if your ideal of cozy and comfortable doesn’t match with Kinkade’s? Who is right? Whose ideal is more closely aligned with the Platonic ideal?

A: It’s ideals all the way down. (Laughs)

Bea: Right!

A: What about other kinds of ideals? Ideal landscapes, like in Claude or Poussin? Ideals of beauty, like Michelangelo’s David, or all those Pre-Raphaelite pictures?

Bea: Landscape is an interesting case, because of how fashions have changed constantly throughout the ages. Back in the medieval times landscape was hardly more than some rocks for the people—the real point of the picture—to stand on. Then it changed over time for landscape to become the focus of some paintings; but it wasn’t necessary or important for those landscapes to be directly copied from reality, from a model. Then in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we had painters who would make sketches from life and assemble finished paintings in the studio, but they would resemble actual real-world landscapes and trees and whatever; then, with the impressionists, painters would go outside and copy directly from the view in front of them and present the result as a true likeness of reality—but no actual landscape ever looked as splitchy-splotchy as, for instance, those Monet waterlily paintings.

A: So there were all sorts of ideas about what counts as “real” landscape.

Bea: Right. At any point in the past three or four hundred years you could have found some artist who was working according to a belief about what was the true way of painting the landscape in front of them; and their idea would have been corroborated by the people around them—despite, in some instances, their own sensory impressions contradicting what they see in the pictures.

A: Fascinating.

Bea: And in the middle ages you would have encountered people who would have said “Landscape? What’s that? The reality is the people and what they are, what they are signifying; who wants pictures of just trees and rocks? What truth is there in painting rocks? Landscape doesn’t have a moral or ethical element, and since the spiritual side of reality is the truest side, to paint landscape is to deny the truth!”

A: Yet in the nineteenth century there’s John Constable who painted landscape specifically for the purpose of conveying moral ideas!

Bea: Right! Amazing, isn’t it, how fashions change! (Laughs) But you mentioned the Pre-Raphaelites earlier; and theirs is an interesting case. Talk a little more about them.

A: Right. With the Pre-Raphaelites there’s this simultaneous attempt to capture both the literal reality of what’s in front of their eyes—every leaf, every blade of grass—and also the ideal conception of feminine beauty.

Bea: But they did so by favoring the same models over and over again—Jane Burden, Elizabeth Siddal—so in a sense, they were copying the reality in front of them, instantiated in their model who also happened to represent the ideal of physical beauty.

A: True. The early Pre-Raphaelites did that, but I’m not certain the second generation of them did so. If I recall, Bourne-Jones and Lord Leighton and those guys were painting from memory.

Bea: I’m not sure either. I don’t know the exact truth about their working methods.

A: Now I want to bring into the conversation that famous quote by Picasso: “Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.”

Bea: Yes. It’s quite a bold statement but it needs to be unpacked. Is he saying that all art is a “lie”? What does he mean by “lie”? He’s really assuming the reader understands the word to mean the same thing as he does. And “truth” is also undefined in that statement.

A: Exactly. Anyone can use that quote to reinforce whatever theory they hold about art; it means nothing at all when you think about it.

Bea: At best I think it would be possible to say that some art could in some contexts be seen as not telling the complete truth about some aspect of reality, and that the non-truth-telling could, again depending on context, lead some people closer to what could, perhaps, count as certain kinds of truths; but I don’t think you can get any more dogmatic about it without making some pretty big assumptions.

A: True.

Bea: There’s so many definitions of art swirling around. It can be tedious to sort through them. And everyone with a definition of art seems to want to say that their definition is the only valid one. Critics are always going on about how such-and-such art is the best, that this-or-that painter isn’t a “real” artist . . .

A: I’m tired of all that kind of thing as well. I’ve bumped into a lot of Christians who point to abstract expressionism or conceptualism and say “that’s not art!”

Bea: Regarding Christianity and art, I think it’s insightful that Tolkien talked about sub-creation. He said that God is the supreme creator, and people are subcreators, working in God’s universe but making little universes of their own. He was talking about literature but the same thing applies to visual arts.

A: Right. And to say that certain kinds of art aren’t legitimate, aren’t “true art,” whatever that is, would be like, I suppose, saying that some animal or plant God made isn’t a “true” animal or plant.

Bea: That’s a good way to put it. And it shows that art is capable of being part of many different contexts and environments. A cactus isn’t appropriate for a jungle—it will die in there—and what’s good art for, say, the inside of a church might not be good in other places, and vice versa.

A: But here we’re getting off our subject. Truth in art shouldn’t necessarily have any relation to goodness any more than it ought to have a relation to beauty—right?

Bea: (Just smiles knowingly)

A: Right??

Bea: Well . . . there’s a long history of philosophers and thinkers who say that the three concepts of truth, goodness, and beauty and rather tightly linked. If something is true it’s necessarily beautiful and good; if good, it’s necessarily beautiful and true; if beautiful, then it’s true and good. That explains all those paintings of things that are rather ugly at first look but in fact are possessed of a sort of higher beauty allied to their truth, which makes them good.

A: Could you give an example?

Bea: There’s Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, for instance. The crucified Christ covered with wounds and sores is a ghastly sight by anyone’s standards; but because it signifies a good and loving action, it becomes a beautiful picture. Or, similarly, Rouault spent most of his artistic energies depicting outcasts and marginalized people who we would not conventionally think of as beautiful. But because Rouault was looking at them with compassion and through the lens of Christ’s having suffered and died for them—similar to Grünewald—his pictures become beautiful.

A: And therefore true and good.

Bea: Yes. At the same time.

A: So it is possible that a painting could be true because it’s beautiful and good—and all those other combinations. But is the reverse true? If a painting is false, does it cease to be good and beautiful? If not beautiful, is it not true, and et cetera?

Bea: That’s hard to answer because I’m sure there is some admirer out there, there’s probably someone who, for every painting, you can find someone who loves it and therefore thinks it is beautiful and true and good. I mean, how could you decide that some work of art is objectively, and for everyone and all time, not good? Not true? not beautiful?

A: What about something that was very obviously made just to pander to some client’s taste, without any sincerity at all on the part of the artist?

Bea: Ah, but you’ve come upon a big ambiguity there! Oscar Wilde said “All bad art is sincere” . . . but he didn’t explain what kind of “sincere” he meant. What is meant by that word? If I make a Basquiat because I have nothing to say and I don’t care about skill but I have a client who will pay me lots of money for it, is that art “sincere”? If I make a Bouguereau, not because I love pretty girls, but because I hate abstract expressionism, is that art “sincere”? If I DO love pretty girls and DO have something to say but can’t draw to save my life so I make something derivative of late cubist Picasso, is that “sincere”? If I make a Kinkade because I feel like I need to prop up some sort of fantasy version of reality—even though I might not believe in that fantasy myself—is that “sincere”?

A: But even a lie can be sincere. “Sincere” and “true” aren’t perfectly synonymous.

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. . . And I think that’s probably enough. The podcast kept going on for a while in the same vein; they kept picking away at the definition of “truth” until by the end they had definitively proved that no picture, ever, under any circumstances, could ever be said to be “true” for any possible meaning of the word. Then they got kind of off topic and started to talk about something funny that happened once at a wedding they attended. So there you go: Victorious Hermit Podcast episode 2—or at least most of it. Like I said, maybe I will publish a transcription of another episode sometime, once I get the time to upload the image files to ChatGPT and translate them. By the way if anyone knows a better way to translate these cuneiform tablets please let me know.

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