This seems like a very controversial statement in the days when it is increasingly difficult to know what’s real and what’s fake.

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”

President John F Kennedy used these words in 1963, honouring the poet Robert Frost who died in January that year.

The idea that art is truth made me stop and think. Isn’t art largely made up? A representation, a fiction, an act of imagination, a flight of fancy? And in the days of AI, how do we know what’s true and what’s fake?

Apparently, this is an argument that has been raging since Plato and Aristotle. One side of the argument is that artworks can’t inform or transmit truth because art is always an interpretation made by both the artist and the observer of the art. The other argument is that for centuries, art has been a source of information about how the world works.

The image for this post is a Roman glass bowl made by the millefiori method C1st Common Era. Source Museum of Artifacts. I guess the least it tells us is that the Romans had skills we would struggle to copy today.

It’s a subject could probably take a lifetime to study, and likely reach no conclusion so I’m stopping here, but if you have an opinion, let me know!

This is part of a series of posts on Questions about Creativity. The rest of the series can be seen at: https://annhawkins.com/creativity