Honest Art?

“Art is a lie that tells the truth.” — Pablo Picasso

Art on one level is inherently false. Images that seek to express in two dimensions what exists in three dimensions is a lie: this flat surface creates the illusion of three-dimensional space. It’s not really three-dimensional, but it looks like it. That makes it false by definition.

Rene Magritte, The treachery of images (This is not a pipe) (La Trahison des images [Ceci n’est pas une pipe]). Oil on canvas, 25 in × 37 in. 1948.

Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe) underscores this: it is a painting that depicts like a picture of a pipe. But it isn’t a pipe. It makes the true statement that it is not a pipe. It’s just a flat representation of a pipe.

Bad art posing as serious art

There is another kind of art that is rather dishonest. It pretends to be serious art, but is in fact a mockery. Thomas Kinkade is the first that comes to mind. Sure, he was technically good, but there’s a point where he ceased to be good and just did whatever the market wanted.

To me that is dishonest. I’ve read that Kinkade wanted to do other art, art that was more expressive, but what he wound up making was essentially bad copies of what made him famous.

It would be like Elvis trying to sing like Elvis. Which I don’t think he ever did. As Elvis got older, his voice got deeper, and he put on really big shows in Vegas. Singing “Can’t Help Falling In Love” in a deep, rich baritone, wearing a glittery, sequined jumpsuit with big hair and flashy sunglasses. Contrast that with when he was getting started: a young white guy in a work shirt playing a guitar, singing with a Negro voice but giving it that edge that made him popular with white kids.

People make jokes about “Fat Elvis” but I think he accepted that he wasn’t young anymore, and he wasn’t capable of doing the same thing he had done 20 years before. He probably wasn’t interested in it, either.

The point is, how honest is your art? Are you making your art solely to fit the whims of the marketplace, or are you being true to who you are as an artist?

Leave room for reinvention

That’s not to say you can’t adapt your art to the situation in order to make a living. For example, Metallica have successfully reinvented themselves many times, when the popular music landscape changed, and when they decided selling their music online wasn’t such a terrible thing after all. They’ve had members come and go, all been in and out of rehab, and their style has changed somewhat, but they’re still the same Metallica.

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