Is there Truth in Art?

        Paintings, which are held of value, did not get to that position by mistake. It was a conscious decision of our species to consider it art. The perspective the artist provides is one that is possibly different from our own. Looking at the night sky everyone sees something different, but we all have Van Gough’s Starry Night to interpret together. This offers us a liberating new glance towards beliefs we may already hold. While it can be argued that culture affects our perception too heavily to be open to new ideas portrayed in art, through expression of a new way in approach those who wish to see beyond what their rose coloured glasses show them, have an opportunity to see.

        In an epistemological pursuit for knowledge, language is a way to express new paradigms and reform old ones. The central problem is without a universal way of expression it is difficult to transmit knowledge across our diverse peoples. Art like the use of metaphor or an elegant mathematical, allows us to understand the ideas and move past the problems of language. For example, almost all representations of the inner working of atoms have been given through metaphor. Thompson’s raisin bun model to describe the way electrons and protons were arranged permitted Bohr to prove him wrong and devise a new method. Similarly, in the case of the epicycles, this perfectly crafted idea was destroyed by Copernicus and Galileo only after it had been understood.

An iconoclast cannot fulfil his duty without knowledge of the traditional knowledge he is destroying. These artistic representations give us a way into both seeing and understand the current in order to create the future.  As a new way of seeing and a way into understanding, ideas with artistic appeal give us a collective view of the world that no other species, which we know of, is privileged with.  We are given the gift of not only experiencing the world around us, but trying to comprehend it.