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ABSTRACT
This paper aims to show that any account of how artworks lie must acknowledge (I) that artworks can lie at different levels of their content—what I call ‘surface’ and ‘deep’—and (II) that, for an artwork to lie at a given level, a norm of truthful communication such as Grice’s Maxim of Quality must apply to it. A corollary is that it’s harder than you might think for artworks to lie: Quality is not automatically ‘switched on’ during our engagement with art. However, I show how a work’s curation and genre-membership can ‘switch on’ Quality, allowing artworks to lie at different levels.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This has implications for art interpretation [Cooke Citation2019] and defining lying [Viebahn Citation2019].
2 More precisely, this painting might present a fictional truth: within this Greek myth, it is true that Jupiter—disguised as a bull—abducts Europa. However, this is still literally false of the actual world. On truth in fiction, see, e.g., Lewis [Citation1978].
3 Artworks might be truth-evaluable because they express propositions: see, e.g., Korsmeyer [Citation1985] and Grzankowski [Citation2015]. Cooke also appears to make this assumption [Citation2019: 262].
4 It’s broadly accepted that a lie is an ‘insincere assertion’ [Fallis Citation2009; Carson Citation2010; Saul Citation2012].
5 This is echoed by Lamarque and Olsen’s ‘no truth’ theory of literature [Citation1994].
6 I don’t mean to place ‘surface’ content in a particular depiction theory; it could be understood under any core approaches (via resemblance, convention, or psychology).
7 Cooke gestures at this when he briefly observes that paradigm cases of artworks lying are due to their ‘respective genres and their contexts of presentation’ [Citation2019: 262].
8 I thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.
9 This genre may not pertain to all depictions of gods interacting with mortals. Lefkowitz [Citation2002] argues that Ancient Greek vase imagery of god-mortal rapes merely concerned power relations between gods and mortals, and was not addressing mortal-mortal norms. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.)
10 This presents an objection to Mahon’s [Citation2019] claim that novels never lie because they do not assert. If what I’ve said is true, then a novel can assert at its deeper level because the work’s genre might switch on Quality here. If a novel can assert, it can lie.
11 Some hold that lying concerns ‘what is said’, not ‘implied’, which instead constitutes misleading content [Saul Citation2012] (although Viebahn [Citation2017] rejects this). If true, then perhaps only deep and surface false content which forms ‘what is said’ by an artwork can constitute lies. It’s not clear how to distinguish between ‘what is said’ and ‘implied’ in artworks though, and I don’t think this distinction maps directly on to the surface/deep distinction. For example, surface content can be implied: Rape of Europa has the surface content that Europa cannot breathe underwater, which may be implied by the way Europa is carried above the ocean.
12 For extremely helpful discussion and comments, I thank Louise Hanson, Vid Simoniti, Derek Matravers, Mat Simpson, Emanuel Viebahn, and James Kirkpatrick. I am also immensely grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal and the editor Stephen Hetherington, and the Moral Sciences Club audience in February 2017. Special thanks go to Rae Langton, without whose unwavering patience and guidance this article could not have been written. Finally, special thanks go to the late Hugh Mellor, deeply missed, to whom this article is dedicated.