Art is a lie that brings us nearer to the truth. (Pablo Picasso) Discuss.
ToK
May 2011
Word Count: 820
Art is a lie that brings us nearer to the truth. (Pablo Picasso)
Art can refer to many things, such as music, film, dance, literature and painting, and it can be interpreted in many ways. In general, art consists of paintings, sculpture, and other pictures or objects that are created for people to look at and admire of think deeply. It can also help us to express our feelings and most of them are the ones that we cannot express through words.
“Art is a lie that brings us nearer to the truth” is a claim said by Pablo Picasso. Although he was mainly a painter and a sculptor, we do not necessarily have to interpret this claim from an artistic point of view, even if I will mainly focus it on visual arts. In my opinion, referring to this quotation, truth is equal to reality, which is everything that surrounds us, such as landscapes and animals, while art represents our thoughts. This means that art helps us to understand better the world, the real things. In addition, I think that Picasso meant that art is a lie, mainly because it’s not a real concrete thing. By saying this, I mean that a painting, for example, is an image of something and not the thing itself. Art is just a representation of the real life, that seems to be true with elements from the world, but in reality it isn’t. Before this survey, we might have thought that each country had its own preferred artwork, but when it was done, the results were very impressing. According to this survey, most of the people prefer a painting that it is mainly a blue landscape, with a mountain, lake and a few wild animals. Melamid, who is one of the two Russian artists that organized this survey, said that “countries shouldn’t try to define themselves by culture, as culturally we’re much more similar than we want to admit.” This proves that most of the people prefer art as a representation of real life.