Art is a lie that brings us closer to the truth- Pablo Picasso. Discuss.

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Arjun Puri         Grade 11        TOK

“Art is a lie that brings us closer to the truth”- Pablo Picasso

"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket; I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." Art is exactly the same: it portrays the truth in the form of a camouflage of words, colour, and speech. People say that art is an imitation of reality; however, it is in fact the total opposite. Reality is restricted by the laws of nature, but art isn’t. It is boundary-less; it can be an exaggeration of reality, it can be the total opposite of reality, it can even be something that is incomprehensible to everybody but the artist.  Art is a manifestation of our inner most emotions that even words fall short in expressing. At times a piece of art, may be the craziest of things, and yet may have enormous philosophical implications. Art need not be an exact imitation of reality, it may in fact be a lie, and yet at the same time may compel us to view things in a different light:  the truth.

To talk about truth, we must first define it. In this context, truth adopts a far more general term, which refers to everything in reality- emotions, relationships, pain, joy etc. By far, the greatest example that complements this quote is a painting called “The Treachery of Images”, which was painted by a Belgian artist- Rene Magritte. The painting is of a pipe, but below the pipe is a line in French saying “This is not a pipe”. Magritte justified himself by saying that if he had written on the painting that this was a pipe, he would have been lying, because it was just a representation of a pipe. He said, it would only be a pipe, if “I could put tobacco in it, and smoke it”.

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Leo Tolstoy wrote a shot novel called “The Diary of a Madman” which is actually an autobiography, but was portrayed using fictional characters. The characters are lies, but it brings people to the truth of Tolstoy. The same idea can be seen in the novel: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, where the author Richard Bach, uses the metaphor of flight as a symbol to illustrate the significance of following one’s dreams even if it’s against all odds. The novel is totally fiction, in other words, lies, but has had the power to shake over a million people. How can a lie have ...

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