Artistic Truth

Abstract

According to Wittgenstein, in the remarks collected as Culture and Value, 'People nowadays think, scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them.' 18th and early 19th century art-lovers would have taken a very different view. Dr. Johnson assumed that the poets had truths to impart, while Hegel insisted that 'In art we have to do not with any agreeable or useful child's play, but with an unfolding of the truth.' Though it still exerts a submerged influence, the concept of artistic truth has since sustained hammer-blows both from modernist aestheticism, which divorces art from reality, and from postmodern subjectivism about truth. This article aims to resurrect it, seeking a middle way between Dr. Johnson's didactic concept of art, and the modernist and postmodernist divorce of art from reality. It argues that high art aims at truth, in something like the way that beliefs are said to aim at truth, that is, it asserts an internal connection with truth. Each artform aims at truth in its own way or ways. This relatively modest claim contrasts high art with art with a small 'a' that aims merely to please, such as sentimental or sensationalist art. The claim is developed by appealing to a post-Romantic conception of art, which says that art is autonomous, and so is its audience in responding to it; artworks present truth-assessable possibilities that should be freely interpretable. On this conception, the most valuable art leaves open to the audience how it should be interpreted, and does not preach or broadcast messages, whether religious or political. In contrast, committed or didactic art with its fixed, often quite simple meaningmedieval wall-paintings in churches, socialist realism, agitprop cinemaleaves no such freedom. These then are the options under consideration: