Art is full of liars

If you haven’t lied, you haven’t lived. If you’ve never been caught inside a lie, you haven’t suffered. If your whole life has been one big web of lies, could you be an artist?

Art has always been a safe space for lies. They’re used as a device: stunts, fabrications, hoaxes, exaggerations, deception, myth making, half-truths and bare untruths – all liberally dished out under the protective veil of creative licence.

In journalism, the truth is not an option, but an obsession. So when you’re a journalist whose specialism is art, who knows what level of reality to operate on. Today, in news, politics, public life and on social media, lies are distributed with few consequences. Fake news and AI have pulverised our ability to trust our own instincts – we’re just not evolving fast enough. All this deception, in places where we expect to find truth, is changing us. So from art, do we want fact or fiction?

When René Magritte wrote, “This is not a pipe”, over a picture of a pipe, they all said, come off it, Magz, of course that’s a bloody pipe! But no, this was an honest man. “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it!” he lamented. “And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe’, I’d have been lying!”

By Magritte’s logic, everything from convincing drapery in a Renaissance painting to Cindy Sherman’s portraits are lies. Jeff Koons lies when he makes objects made of bronze or steel look like inflatable vinyl. Thomas Demand lies when he takes pictures of interiors which turn out to be intricate models made entirely of cardboard. Digital artists lie when they make pixels look tangible. Damien Hirst apparently lies, well, about quite a lot. Realists are the worst of all: they lie to make sculpture and paint look like actual flesh. So, is the most ‘truthful’ art that which doesn’t claim to represent anything? Abstraction, for instance, is all about avoiding reality in favour of material and subconscious exploration. Found objects – a Koons Hoover, a Duchamp urinal, Mike Nelson’s defunct machinery, Sarah Lucas’ mattress, Tracey Emin’s bed – are also quite sincere forms of art. They’re sort of playing themselves, like in reality TV.

Back when art used to serve a practical function to record lives and document events, rich people used to get their portraits done. One purpose of these was for what now looks like the equivalent of the Raya dating app, whereby elite prospective brides would have their portraits painted and shipped to royal courts for appraisal. Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1539 portrait of Anne of Cleves is a classic of the genre, painted as her dating ad profile pic for Henry VIII while he was assessing candidates for his fourth wife. But when they met IRL, Henry had the sense that Holbein’s portrait had mis-represented Anne. “She is nothing so fair as she hath been reported”, he complained, inadvertently becoming one of the earliest known catfish victims.

But beyond functional art, isn’t the artist’s job to help us escape reality? In a 2019 essay for Tate, art historian John-Paul Stonard argued that the most powerful art is based in untruth. “It certainly seems that we live in a time of great earnestness of art. Works of art are used to throw light on political issues, to highlight identities, to be socially engaged, to try to change the world for the better – to do the virtuous work of reform.” All of this, he says, is well intended, but it does not make for the most engaging art.

At this point, I’m well out of my depth and in dire need of someone with credentials. How about America’s ‘Best known expert on lying’ (Reader’s Digest)? Pamela Meyer thinks we’re living in a pandemic of deception, and she would know. The author, certified fraud examiner and entrepreneur wrote a 2010 book called Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception. She also trains businesses on fraud detection and insider threat mitigation. Basically, if you ever meet her, don’t even try it.

But what’s her take on art? “Humans have a love-hate relationship with deception,” she tells me. “We hate being lied to yet our brains revel in well crafted illusion. From a scientific perspective, there is likely a dopamine hit we get when we see a marble sculpture that looks like flowing fabric.” Meyer explains that deception in art can’t be compared to moral lies. “It taps into our primal enjoyment of wonder. It winks at us, lets us in on the con, and allows us to be fooled without moral baggage. Why do we willingly surrender to the artist’s deception? Because there is something deeply pleasurable about entering the artist’s ‘safe zone’ where we can indulge our sense of wonder and flirt with falsehood without feeling danger or lack of control. Wonder emerges when we encounter things that don’t fit our mental templates and it catapults us back to our childhood lens where everything is a bit new, slightly out of reach and surprising. This momentary liberation from certainty is to be treasured. A form of deception we can live for.”

So are creative people more prone to lying than non-creative people? Yes, according to a major 2011 research paper dedicated to the subject. In The dark side of creativity: Original thinkers can be more dishonest, leading behavioural scientists Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely proposed that individuals with creative personalities were more likely to justify unethical behaviour. They were more prone to cheating, more likely to behave dishonestly and more “morally flexible”, as the study claims. Fascinating! Except we have no idea if any of this is true given that, in the anaconda of ironic twists, both Gino and Ariely – in separate investigations – were alleged to have used falsified data across a variety of their own papers. Can Meyer help out on this one? This is not her niche, and she has no scientific evidence to bind creativity to dishonesty, but she does explain that “anecdotally, because creative people often see their role as exposing hidden truths, they often report that they are terrible liars.”

Indeed, anecdotally, there are plenty of examples of artists lying, particularly about their own lives for a variety of reasons, and sometimes, no reason at all. On the more harmless end of the spectrum is Frida Kahlo, who shaved three years off her age. Not for vanity, but to align her birth year with the start of the 1910 Mexican revolution and the dawn of modern Mexico. Fair enough.

Then there’s Disumbrationism, an art movement founded by avant-garde Russian artist Pavel Jerdanowitch 1924. Haven’t heard of the movement or the man? That’s because both are fake. Disumbrationism was a hoax created by American Latin scholar Paul Jordan-Smith. He began this stunt after his wife, the artist Sarah Bixby Smith, received a frosty reception from an LA art exhibition jury for her still lifes. Jordan-Smith’s revenge was to become an artist. In 1925, he made a crudely-rendered painting of a Pacific islander woman holding a banana having just killed a man and speared his skull with a stick. He submitted the work – alongside a photograph of himself as Jerdanowitch – to the same group of critics that had scorned his wife’s work. They were enamoured with his painting. But other than shaming a few high-horsed critics, Disumbrationism proved pretty innocuous. Plus, aren’t all art movements just made up anyway? Get a few disenfranchised artists in a room together and the likelihood is a movement will emerge.

In 1944, Joseph Beuys was in a German bomber flying over the Crimea. The plane crashed, the pilot died and Beuys was severely injured. This all happened. What didn’t happen was that a group of nomadic Tartars found him and wrapped him in fat and felt to keep him warm, but that’s what he told everyone. Oh, please, he’s an artist! Cut him a bit of creative slack. What’re a few untruths between creative friends? Beuys will be Beuys… Yet if a politician had pulled that one, there would be outrage. “Politicians trade in public trust. Their words form the underbelly of policy, law and promises we expect them to keep,” says Meyer. “We offer them our vote in a trusting exchange and feel deep betrayal when they don’t keep up their side of what is on some level, a contractual relationship. We seek something different from artists – something deeper and more poetic – and while this does not forgive their embellishments it explains our shifting standards.”

Artist and musician Don Van Vliet (AKA Captain Beefheart) had a notorious taste for self-mythologising. His lies started early. He claimed that he remembered being born (don’t we all); that he was descended from Peter van Vliet, a Dutch painter and associate of Rembrandt (hmm, not ringing any bells); that he never attended school (he appears in the graduation yearbook), and that he went a year and half without sleep (give me strength). Van Vliet’s non-exclusive relationship with the truth became part of the act, the art, the myth of the man.

But what happens when deception in the name of art implicates others more invasively? French conceptual artist Sophie Calle has walked this tightrope for her entire career. For her 1981 photo series, The Hotel, Calle took a job as a maid in a Venice hotel for the sole purpose of documenting the private habits of its guests. She hid a camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, and over the course of three weeks, compiled an audio-visual inventory of strangers’ lives – their habits, routines and dirty secrets: sex, arguments, banal conversations; bins, bras, pants, porn mags, suitcases, dildos, letters, diaries. She took nothing but photographs and recordings. She left everything exactly as she found it.

Filmmaker and artist Kenneth Anger’s lust for lies was even more toxic. His book, Hollywood Babylon exposed apparent scandals surrounding Hollywood stars from the 1900s to the 1950s. He made up fake stories about real people (many of which would become entrenched urban myths) and illustrated the book with a lurid assortment of graphic images, including pictures of actual suicides. The book did not go down well. Film historian Kevin Brownlow was one of its most ardent critics, describing Anger’s research method as “mental telepathy, mostly”. You could view Anger’s stunt in one of two ways: a dangerous episode of libellous mania designed to attract easy attention through exploitation and lies. Or, it could be art – a layered prod at the early cult of celebrity and an insatiable appetite for sleaze, scandal and gossip – regardless of its validity. In which case, it’s all fine, right? It’s creative licence. “Deception in art becomes problematic when it disregards the dignity or rights of others, treating them sometimes as raw material”, says Meyer. “But where we draw that line between creative licence and exploitation is deeply personal.”

We’re existing in a time when “I’ve seen it with my own eyes” can no longer be trusted. According to Meyer, this is altering us psychologically. “We could talk for hours about this… First, we’re seeing the rise of what could be called ‘truth fatigue.’ With every swipe, scroll and click, we get bombarded by information of dubious authenticity that looks so real,” she says. “The cognitive load of constantly questioning what’s real is mentally exhausting, and it can lead to a kind of psychological numbing.”

“The ubiquity of AI-driven deep fakes could change our human sensibility for what is actually real. Could we lose this sixth sense? We could well become more relativistic, seeing ‘truth’ as something fluid or subjective because we’re constantly confronting conflicting narratives.”

Meyer goes a step further: “I think we are already becoming less concerned with objective facts and more focused on narratives that simply feel right to us, regardless of evidence. The psychological impact is a shift from a culture of seekers of truth to one of ‘truth curators,’ each of us constructing reality as we’d like it to be.” For anyone that values a modicum of stability in life, this extreme subjectivity is alarming. Art can inhabit all manner of truths. And whether it’s my truth, your truth or the truth – it’s all become opinion, and it’s very hard to argue with those.

At least art is honest about its lies. John Ruskin said that “nothing can be beautiful, which is not true”; Picasso said, “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.” I’m siding with Picasso on this one – we should never let facts get in the way of a good piece of art.