Art is a lie that tells the truth.
Pablo Picasso.
Formative: Write down 3 of the theories we heard from the podcast
- Batteux
- Kant
- Dickey and Danto
- Levinson
- Wollheim
- Emmons
What is the most truthful work of art you know?
How do meaningfulness and truth relate?
Review truth theories
Mythological truth:
Mythology ... refers to a body of stories that attempt to explain the origins and fundamental values of a given culture and the nature of the universe and humanity. In modern usage, the term can also mean stories that a particular culture believes to be true and that use the supernatural to interpret natural events. Ancient myths are generally founded by imagination and intuition rather than objective evidence. Myths identify and help explain human propensities and natural phenomena with the actions and attributes of gods in a primordial past.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mythology
Werner Herzog ecstatic truth and accountant's truth
Bernini - Ecstasy of Saint
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Herzog and His Heroes
Minnesota declaration (1999)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog
"Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema", Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (30 April 1999)
- By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
- Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
- Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
- There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
- Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
- Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
- Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
- We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
- Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
