Truth in art

Presented by Raphael Zagury-Orly, philosopher

With Paul Audi, philosopher
Didier Ottinger, curator, expert in modern and contemporary painting

The meeting will begin with a screening of Grosse fatigue, a 13-minute colour video with sound created by Camille Henrot in 2013 and acquired the same year by the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

If truth has to do with knowledge, it is, in its basic sense, the agreement between a thought, a judgement or a theory and reality (or a segment of reality, given reality is infinite) and is therefore opposed to falsehood and sometimes with morality, as truth-telling opposed to lying, then its relationship with art is enigmatic in both cases. How can art capture a part of reality, even momentarily – as science does – and how can it (not) lie? Yet, things are not so simple in reality because art, whether plastic, visual, graphic or sound, allows us to see or hear something of the world, if not what cannot be heard or seen in the world. It is generally objected that this is some type of illusion since the ‘meaning’ we attribute to art is a matter of subjectivity and the interpretation that each person gives or makes of a work of art, which, at best, would allow us to say that art produces and brings a multiplicity of truths into coexistence. But this view is also tenuous because, if we accept it, we would not understand how a work of art could continue to produce meaning, question, disturb, delight and please, even as it endures through the centuries and as the regimes of subjectivity, sensibility and intellect have changed a thousand times over the centuries. Therefore, the truth of art cannot be that of the 'individual' who produces or receives it, but a truth of the world and of humanity that 'contains' even what humanity, with its tools of knowledge, sensation and 'feeling', cannot say about the world or about itself.

In collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.