“Lies are interesting for what they reveal about the liar.”
- Federico Fellini
Though socially fractured societies are more the rule than the exception these days, modern humans seem to have at least one point of solid consensus: that we are living in a time of universal deceit. None of the established castes, from the government to the military to the priesthood to the merchant class, proceed with their traditionally designated activities without at least some significant portion of the population being skeptical of ulterior motives and dishonest communication of events as they actually transpired. Artists are no exception to this hemorrhaging of trust. Yet, ever since this epoch of incredulity has become generally acknowledged as such, it has been the artist that has been the most consistently vocal about bearing the standard of “truth” (this in spite of playing a societal role whose exact purpose, if not outright need to exist in the first place, could not further from a universal consensus). The irony of this stance is noteworthy; most art is after all an abstraction. However it is also more than that: it is, as memorably stated in Orson Welles’ F is for Fake, “a lie that makes us realize the truth.” In this simple axiomatic statement we have the key to both the successes of contemporary art, and to its failures.
There have to be good reasons why the “artist” designation remains a desirable achievement in a civilization where such people are almost completely expendable, and where the parameters of “artistry” continue to expand into what would have been terra incognita for established artists only 50 years ago. Chief among these, I’d argue, is this public goodwill towards the idea that art, even if not pleasurable or conferring any immediately intuited benefits, is at the very least “authentic”(read: “the truth”) and less corruptible than other endeavors that pull in 100 times the return on investment. It is these assumptions that make it possible for, say, the Subway sandwich chain to outfit its employees in the much-derided uniforms declaring them to be “sandwich artists”, or really for any process leading to a respectable end product to be described as “the ‘art’ of ‘x’”. There seems to be a tacit agreement that, when artists are embraced by the public, it is because their activities are compelled by “other” pure and numinous forces, and are therefore inoculated against profit motives and other guarantors of falsehood (it is odd that serial killers and other sadists are rendered demonic in the public eye by acting upon “compulsion”, whereas artists are praised for this, but this is already too much of a digression).
This belief in a “direct line” to something of superhuman purity and integrity maybe gives artists license to use falsity as a starting point where, say, the increasingly despised journalistic class would not be permitted to present anything but an unbroken chain of narrative truths from start to finish. This applies even if the truth being revealed by artists is, in fact, the continual mutability of the idea of “truth” itself, or even the question of proper attribution / provenance for an artwork. From Warhol on down to Koons and Hirst, it is no longer a secret that some of the most fêted works are assembly-line products developed from the collective labor of a small cadre of personal assistants, and that the actual selling point of these “originals” is their ability to give the public a feeling of being stakeholders in the primary planners’ aura of genius (aspects of which are often obvious media fabrications).
That all of this is now met with collective shrugs rather than collective outrage is likely because of the public service it provides, i.e. pointing to mechanisms of deception, obfuscation, etc. that govern vastly different areas of human interaction. Likewise, actions such as Yves Klein’s “signing” the sky, or Piero Manzoni’s doing the same with live nude models, can be denounced as “fraudulent” artworks where certain traditions of craftsmanship are concerned, and all the same they have something honest to say about the arbitrariness of certain fiat decrees of authority throughout human history. This is to say nothing of the vast critical / theoretical enterprise that erupted upon realizing that the “fake” synthetic reality concocted by artists regularly became more perceptibly “real” than the organic experiences it was an abstraction of. Such synthetic realities are far from being a footnote in the history of creativity, with luminaries like Federico Fellini confessing (in the documentary I’m a Born Liar) that “for me, the things that are most real are the ones that I invented […] the real town of Rimini where I grew up and went to school has almost faded away, to give way to the Rimini, the town I described in great detail in my two films I vitelloni or Amarcord”.
Now, the belief in the essential authenticity of certain creative strategies has gone a long way towards excusing actions that would be inexcusable in other social contexts, and the “lie that makes us realize the truth” has certainly been invoked to help de-escalate situations in which people are loudly clamoring for their money back. We could consider the case of James Frey, one of multiple authors to have written a completely fabricated confessional for the Book Club of ‘wellness’ empress Oprah Winfrey. Frey’s runaway publishing hit A Million Little Pieces sold millions on the back of Winfrey’s endorsement of its “authentic” gritty contents, which dealt with the hero’s journey of a bottomed-out drug abuser, and which were revealed to be a whole-cloth fabrication almost as quickly as the book rose to prominence. Curiously, although Frey’s Book Club benefactor initially felt “duped” and “betrayed” by his antics (up to and including claims that a real teenage girl’s death was an event he personally experienced), she made at least a half-hearted defense of the work before relenting to the public pressure to hold the author fully accountable. This itself, though no longer Winfrey’s definitive statement on the matter, was interesting and hardly at all out of character for what critic Andrew Potter called “the queen of […] heavily emotive authenticity”:[i] it seemed to admit, in no uncertain terms, that specific fabrications had the ability to carry us into the realm of general truth; that elaborate hoaxes may still aim at the quality of truth while not being a specific instance of truth.
We can debate whether or not this would have happened had Frey not had such a lucrative run to begin with, but it did happen nevertheless, and it is telling that the losing defense of Frey was predicated upon a general truth being nested within his particular lie. It is also interesting that the value of the former, in the grand scheme of things, was seen as having the power to absolve the artist of an initial transgression against authenticity. In Potter’s reckoning, this defense of the “lie concealing a truth” fit seamlessly into the Oprah-ian worldview wherein “history is and ought always to be the slave of the passions…feelings are what matter”. Enlarging upon this idea, Potter writes
…the fact that Frey made up his book makes it fictional and historically inaccurate, but it does not thereby make it “inauthentic” in an Oprahian sense. In Oprah’s world, authenticity is nothing more than a contemporary version of Rousseau’s original idea that one’s true inner self is not so much discovered as it is invented, which makes the distinction between fiction and non-fiction essentially irrelevant.[ii]
For many of us, there is not that much comfort in the idea that a resonant truth will eventually be born from a pack of lies, and any form of lying at any time is an automatic disqualification from “insider status”. I can at least sympathize with one aspect of this skeptical view, in particular I concur that an increased focus on the identity of the artist has taken the arts down some very sordid avenues. As genres like performance / body art, conceptual art etc. caused the artist to be viewed not just the originator of her work but as an integral part of it, the temptation became overwhelming to ‘tweak’ biographical information so that the artist’s background would become a much more intriguing lens through which to view and understand her art. This state of affairs is definitely not mono-causal, and can be owed to a convergence of many different “art world” exigencies: see, for example, the need for gallerists and curators to ease audiences into the experience of increasingly “immaterial” art projects. Or the need to transfer “ornamental” aspects of art onto the personality once this became unfashionable in such movements as Minimalism (see Adolf Loos’ seminal essay “Ornament and Crime”). Or the astonishing glut in some creative fields (music), which often necessitates “quirky” biographies as a differentiator when no other distinguishing marks of talent are at hand.
This all manages to tie in somehow with the musing, in F is for Fake, of Clifford Irving (Irving was himself the notorious faker of Howard Hughes’ “autobiography”): “the important distinction when considering the quality of a painting is not whether it is real or fake, but whether it is a good fake or a bad fake.” As with paintings, perhaps so with painters: what are the circumstances in which falsification of personal history is beneficial to creativity as a whole, and when is this only a cynical play to get a greater share of the limelight than what would otherwise be available?
Before answering that question, it has been my personal experience that the artist engages in selective editing of biographical detail to a far greater degree than any other legally acknowledged profession (if and when the artist is lucky enough to pull in a “professional” income from her activities). The expectation that the artist appear publicly as an “eccentric” already sets innumerable artists up for a life of biographical un-truth, since authentic eccentricity is a behavior carried out by those who are not conscious of its peculiarity, i.e. they do not know how to act otherwise. Beyond this, though, are manifestations of this behavior that I do find much more distasteful in that they cause “real-world” harm to the largely undeserving, and are brazenly hypocritical in direct proportion to how much a given artist stakes claims on a “truthful” discourse.
This would include the common insistence that success was earned by some kind of heroic “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” labor; when in fact potentially “embarrassing” sources of support (most often an artist’s own loving family, or more financially and mentally stable romantic partner) deserve to be credited for that personal progress. A similarly inclined “self-edit” is the deliberately obscured receipt of funding for projects meant to forward a certain socio-political stance, when the funding body is indifferent or hostile to that stance (I have known, for example, radical “anarchists” who apparently thought nothing of accepting State grants for foreign tours). Lastly (but keep in mind this isn’t an exhaustive inventory) we have the Stalinist erasure of past collaborators whose aesthetic or philosophical heresies, or even mere existence, became an inconvenience to the self-editing artist. Here I can point to at least one major player in the development of performance art and “transgressive” aesthetics, who disgracefully performed this act of airbrushing on an ex-spouse, presumably since this was a troublesome disruption of a storybook life-as-art performance narrative involving the sacred union of said individual and a subsequent life partner.
Andrew McKenzie, whose multi-media project The Hafler Trio spent decades colorfully exploring the truthfulness and deception of our lived experiences (an upcoming book on the project is titled, after a famous quote from Wittgenstein, It’s True Enough), has claimed much first-hand experience with the scenarios outlined above, and manages to be on the receiving end of such claims as well. His comments on the endemic duplicity of personal identity in the art world are poignant, in that they reveal how truly unnecessary much of this strategy of deception truly is:
This [activity] seems to be not [originating from] people who are trying to make a name for themselves, this is people who have made a name for themselves, and who have incredibly colorful, exciting, fascinating backgrounds – warts and all – and yet they still feel the need to mythologize, and to clean [their biographies] up to the point where they can look in the mirror and say, “ah, yes, that’s why I did that”. [iii]
McKenzie continues along this path, and while doing so offers an answer to the question of what distinguishes “good” fakers from “bad” ones:
It’s gotten to the point of absurdity now, where people are literally denying that things actually happened. That seems to be me to be getting into somewhat dodgy territory where you have to question motives, and I think the motivations and motives of people are extremely important – in many cases more than the actual results of what happens. If the motivation is to make yourself more perfect, better and fully-formed than your fellow lunatic artist, then I don’t think that’s a very noble or heroic aspiration. Someone who has tried genuinely and failed is far more interesting than someone who has tried and succeeded by being completely false, I would say.[iv]
To make a Hollywood Babylon style litany of cases like the above would be simple enough, but anyone attempting this would risk becoming friendless and bereft of opportunity within that milieu: in the cutting-edge art world, king-making critics, curators and primary creators are often a single entity, and this generally means that intimations of moral failings and duplicity are off the table for all but the most serious offenses. Yet the sheer number of historical revisionists in the field is of little interest without considering why they come about in the first place, and I believe that there are reasons for this beyond the simple acknowledgement that making a career out of art-ifice gives one license to fabricate key aspects of identity and lived experience.
For one, the myth of authenticity is still tightly interwoven with the myth of originality, even long after the post-modernist schools used the “death of the author” as a stand-in for the “death of God”. Hans Bellmer’s quote that “an object identical with itself is without reality”[v] seems to apply to the artist’s anxious compulsion to become recognized as wholly unique, and to, again, place the focus on identity’s role in creation at the expense of works that leave a lasting impression. The trajectory of much Western modern art, defined as it is by projects that often involve minute-to-minute access to the intimate life of the artist, seems to be guided by a kind of horror vacui; a fear that there is nothing but a yawning void if recognition and affirmation are not attained, and if a place in history is not secured (and more than enough artists, self-identifying as “progressive,” seem to invest in that term a vision of a linear history in which things are scientifically proven to get better and better, with no side-steps or reversals). McKenzie contends that moving beyond this pervasive anxiety of identity may be a crucial step towards, if not just identifying the “good fakes,” realizing an altruistic art that can genuinely provide new perspectives:
The point, as far as I’m concerned, with the whole idea of real creation (and I’m not just talking about moving things around into a different order, which to me is not really creative), but something genuinely new – that needs “stepping aside,” that needs this genuine wish to have something bigger than yourself come into being, rather than […] an idealized version, what you want people to believe you are like.[vi]
McKenzie’s thoughts on this subject tie in neatly with what is maybe the linchpin moment of F is for Fake, in which Welles rhapsodizes about the stunning visual effect of Chartres Cathedral. In the process, he dismisses questions of authenticity both as they relate to artistic provenance and the sense of unique identity:
You know, it might just be this one anonymous glory, of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose, when all our cities are dust, to stand intact; to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. […] “Be of good heart,” cry the dead artists out of the living past: “our songs will all be silenced.” But what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.
Welles’ impassioned soliloquy suggests that, rather than falsifying their own histories, artists are better served by “stepping aside” entirely to let the historical chips fall where they may. His speech also implies that, paradoxically, those with no ambition to be personally identified as their works’ originators may end up creating the most monumental, resonant works possible within the confines of this planet. As McKenzie suggests above, motivations can be as important or more important than results, and there is certainly no prerequisite that a great work need be motivated by the dissemination of biographical information, nor any guarantee that weaving an elaborate brocade of lies about the self will make a work more interesting. Having conceded that art more often than not deviates from unassailable truth, perhaps the “bad fakers” can be identified as ones whose lies can only ever self-aggrandize, while the fictions and confabulations of “good fakers” expand the universe of creativity and do so in ways that may even put the “fakers’” reputation at risk. As we continue to grasp for the tantalizing fruit of authenticity, this apparent truth is worth entertaining: there are lies which exist in order to monopolize control of a creative presentation, and lies which allow for the value of the creation to exceed the personal ambition of the creator; to escape from his hands and be interpreted in as many ways as there are angles from which to perceive a finished work. The “good fakers” may very well be the ones who realize that, once they’ve committed to the game of fabrication and falsehood, they are not entitled to a monopoly on the truth.
[i] Potter, A. (2010). The Authenticity Hoax: Howe We Get Lost Finding Ourselves. McClelland & Stewart: Toronto.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Andrew McKenzie in conversation with the author, January 9 2022.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Webb, P. & Short, R. (1985). Hans Bellmer. Quartet Books: London.
[vi] McKenzie (2022).