Truth in Art

Extract

It seems at least daring to speak of truth on the subject of art, when Plato, in the Sophiste, 234c, likens art to sophistry, in other words, to falsity and deformation. To be sure, this comparison is based on an exaggeration, because elsewhere Plato insists on the necessity of artistic reality: in the same Sophiste, 299e, he states that “life would be unlivable without art.” The importance thus given to art becomes obvious when we think that this same expression is already used in the Apologie, 38a, with regard to philosophy, the activity that for a man conscious of his own existence is one of scrupulously examining his own life. This similarity in expression testifies to the conceptual and axiological similarity of two (but distinct) activities of the mind effected by Plato who, on a different level, as we have just seen, unhesitatingly condemns one of them, at least apparently; apparently, because basically Plato does not inveigh against art in general but against the art of his contemporaries, whom he openly accuses of accepting the postulate of verisimilitude by using artifice and acrobatics, with the sole end of pleasing the crowds by flattery. In other words, they substitute for the scarch for authenticity that of dexterity in creations conceived only for that effect, which means identifying this type of substitution of values with a prostitution of the artist himself with regard to his public.