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Journal #71 - March 2016
Boris Groys
The Truth of Art
The central question to be asked about art is this one: Is art capable of being a medium of
truth? This question is central to the existence and survival of art because if art cannot be a
medium of truth then art is only a matter of taste. One has to accept the truth even if one does
not like it. But if art is only a matter of taste, then the art spectator becomes more important
than the art producer. In this case art can be treated only sociologically or in terms of the art
market—it has no independence, no power. Art becomes identical to design.
Now, there are different ways in which we can speak about art as a medium of truth. Let me
take one of these ways. Our world is dominated by big collectives: states, political parties,
corporations, scientific communities, and so forth. Inside these collectives the individuals
cannot experience the possibilities and limitations of their own actions—these actions become
absorbed by the activities of the collective. However, our art system is based on the
presupposition that the responsibility for producing this or that individual art object, or
undertaking this or that artistic action, belongs to an individual artist alone. Thus, in our
contemporary world art is the only recognized field of personal responsibility. There is, of
course, an unrecognized field of personal responsibility—the field of criminal actions. The
analogy between art and crime has a long history. I will not go into it. Today I would, rather,
like to ask the following question: To what degree and in what way can individuals hope to
change the world they are living in? Let us look at art as a field in which attempts to change
the world are regularly undertaken by artists and see how these attempts function. In the
framework of this text, I am not so much interested in the results of these attempts as the
strategies that the artists use to realize them.
Indeed, if artists want to change the world the following question arises: In what way is art
able to influence the world in which we live? There are basically two possible answers to this
question. The first answer: art can capture the imagination and change the consciousness of
people. If the consciousness of people changes, then the changed people will also change the
world in which they live. Here art is understood as a kind of language that allows artists to
send a message. And this message is supposed to enter the souls of the recipients, change their
sensibility, their attitudes, their ethics. It is, let’s say, an idealistic understanding of
art—similar to our understanding of religion and its impact on the world.
However, to be able to send a message the artist has to share the language that his or her
audience speaks. The statues in ancient temples were regarded as embodiments of the gods:
they were revered, one kneeled down before them in prayer and supplication, one expected
help from them and feared their wrath and threat of punishment. Similarly, the veneration of
icons has a long history within Christianity—even if God is deemed to be invisible. Here the
common language had its origin in the common religious tradition.
However, no modern artist can expect anyone to kneel before his work in prayer, seek
practical assistance from it, or use it to avert danger. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, Hegel diagnosed this loss of a common faith in embodied, visible divinities as the
reason for art losing its truth: according to Hegel the truth of art became a thing of the past.
(He speaks about pictures, thinking of the old religions vs. invisible law, reason, and science
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that rule the modern world.) Of course, in the course of modernity many modern and
contemporary artists have tried to regain a common language with their audiences by the
means of political or ideological engagement of one sort or another. The religious community
was thus replaced by a political movement in which artists and their audiences both
participated.
However, art, to be politically effective, to be able to be used as political propaganda, has to
be liked by its public. But the community that is built on the basis of finding certain artistic
projects good and likable is not necessarily a transformative community—a community that
can truly change the world. We know that to be considered as really good (innovative, radical,
forward looking), modern artworks are supposed to be rejected by their
contemporaries—otherwise, these artworks come under suspicion of being conventional,
banal, merely commercially oriented. (We know that politically progressive movements were
often culturally conservative—and in the end it was this conservative dimension that
prevailed.) That is why contemporary artists distrust the taste of the public. And the
contemporary public, actually, also distrusts its own taste. We tend to think that the fact that
we like an artwork could mean that this artwork is not good enough—and the fact that we do
not like an artwork could mean that this artwork is really good. Kazimir Malevich believed
that the greatest enemy of the artist is sincerity: artists should never do what they sincerely
like because they probably like something that is banal and artistically irrelevant. Indeed, the
artistic avant-gardes did not want to be liked. And—what is even more important—they did
not want to be “understood,” did not want to share the language which their audience spoke.
Accordingly, the avant-gardes were extremely skeptical toward the possibility of influencing
the souls of the public and building a community of which they would be a part.