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Art Never Tells The Truth
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Message
Posted
I'm still reading extracts from Oscar Wilde's work - here's another of his 'gems'. (From The Decay of Lying)
He makes the point inter alia that (1) people of the middle ages bore no resemblance to their images on stained glass, mediaeval carvings, gargoyles etc, (2) the Japanese bear no relation to the work of Hokkei, Hokusai etc, and (3) Athenian ladies tightly laced with their hair dyed yellow looked nothing like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze.
From all this he arrives at the conclusion that if 'we look back through the ages through the medium of art, very fortunately, art has never told us the truth'.
Hasn't it? If so, is that still the case today and is it 'very fortunately' ?
Edited
by MichaelEdwards
Posted
I probably agree that it hasn't. I concluded long ago from my photography that far from "the camera never lies", the camera actually never tells the truth.
Like all art the camera gives a hint of truth, but no.more. For sure, what the camera shows probably existed (until Photoshop), or elements anyway , but no more.
Art is probably the same...was that hay Wain there? Was Mona Lisa smiling? We know that what is truth changes- .medieval paintings showing Jesus in medieval dress, Egyptian carvings showing people going into combat with their hands all wonky.
Not just art of course but other "facts" too...the Victorian invention of the history of the chastity belt for example. Heavy unwieldy armour for knights as another.
Truth changes and it's hard to get at, possibly because largely it does not matter. It does not matter wjatbjesus wore, where the hay Wain was or whether Lisa was a smiling coquette or a grumpy cow. What matters is something else entirely.
Perhaps it's a recent thing, this desire for what we call truth or perhaps it is not. Perhaps it is every generations task to find it's own truth and what matters. The fact is as soon as YOU see something I saw, but out of context,you will not see the truth but my interpretation of it...or your interpretation of the slice I show you.
Whether this is "fortunate" or not I don't know but I suspect it's neither fortunate nor unfortunate but inevitable. That was probably Wilde being clever.
What matters is something else.
David.
Posted
I haven't read Wilde for a good many years - and I begin to see why.
However - it's news to me that art and history are one and the same thing, and Wilde can't really have thought they were; so he was saying something else; or else just being provocative; at which he excelled.
Is he saying that artists idealize and misrepresent truth; that they don't actually deal with it at all; that they use it for their own purposes; that they serve their patrons by flattering them and enumerating their possessions and celebrating their wealth and power? Well that would have been quite a radical point of view in the late 19th century - a foretaste perhaps of John Berger's Ways of Seeing. In a less flowery age, one might perhaps have wished that he could have just come out and said it, rather than dressing it up in epigrams, I suppose.
He also said "all art is quite useless". Which is a statement laden with meaning, but possibly even objectionable if taken at face value without asking what he's REALLY saying (in literal terms, of course, it's true - but Oscar rarely soiled his hands with the literal: there was always a text within the text, and I think he intended those sufficiently interested to work at finding out what it was).
You can never be sure with Wilde - which is the pleasure of reading him, actually - if he's just throwing words at you for effect; if he's teasing you; or if he's saying something profound whose meaning you need to extract for yourself. You also can't be sure that he didn't just say things out of laziness when in company, dropping a careless epigram into a lull in the chatter. When he wrote, though, I think the consensus among critics is that he knew exactly what he was doing, thought about it carefully, and crafted his compositions in such a way as to puzzle, amuse, infuriate - but never bore.
So he can drive you mad, but we're still talking about him over 100 years after his death. He'd have been quite pleased with that.
Edited
by RobertJones
Posted
The sad reality is that history is rarely ever the truth.
Almost everything written down has been re-written and edited, "fixed", sanitised.. - And that doesn't matter if it;s the bible or a record of village numbers in 950 AD
Even "proper records" are designed by the victors - be it war or financial battle (or diplomatic battle).
About all we can do is cross match and correlate the data - when 5 different sources point in the same direction than we can accept that direction as the right one.
That's why I believe the WW2 Holocaust stories, but don't believe the bible... cross referencing matches in one and not the other (my opinion only, not trying to start a religious battle here).
Posted
No battles to be started but theres probably more cross referenced evidence for the bible than the holocaust. The archeological evidence, even for old testament stuff, is immense. But the rest is up to each on his own.
Mind you, when you say "believe the Bible", I wonder what it is you think the "bible" is asking you to believe? No, don't answer. You don't believe it and I'm an anglican ordinand...
David
Posted
There's an awful lot of Bible to believe in - or not believe in. But I don't want to get into that. We'd be here all night.
If you take a period I know something about, so far as anyone does, there's history which has been fabricated and repeated as though it were true - eg the history of 19th and early 20th century China. We can be confident that many of the books aren't true because they're based on one colossal forgery (by a clever crook named Backhouse and a credulous colleague named Bland). So many historians, or alleged historians, have just consulted that book and repeated the nonsense in it ad nauseam. So truth? Wassat?
This gets sensitive with the Holocaust of course, because neo-Nazis and anti-Semites have been prepared to lie about it, too. Whereas it perhaps doesn't matter if people believe that the Empress Dowager of China murdered her nephew the Emperor and had one of his concubines thrown down a well (she probably didn't) it does matter if people question the truth of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and matters to me because my father was among the British soldiers who liberated the place. Whether art can tell us the truth about either I doubt: but then - why would we expect it to?
Art can maybe open a window on part of the truth, provide a subjective account of it, give one person's perspective on it - or use the truth for other purposes entirely, as Shakespeare often did. Oscar must have thought he knew what the truth was - or he couldn't have asserted that art didn't tell it. So what did he believe?
I'm inclined, to be quite honest, just not to ask.Oscar Wilde - you were a troublemaker.
Posted
Happy birthday, backdated to whenever it was, Syd.
A friend of mine celebrated his 90th birthday: I asked him how he felt: well, he said, it's a bit like asking someone how he feels when falling from a skyscraper window, when he's half way down: all right so far.
He lived to be 105, by the way.