Filed by Bil at 8:42 pm under Fightin' Words, The Arts

I’m gonna lay it out there: I’m a little bit tired of all this talk about truth. Truth with a capital T. “Truth” in quotes. Truth with a cherry on top. I’m up to my neck in truth.

I will avoid naming them because of the nature of this entry, but lately I have been reading some blogs by some very sharp minds. Without commenting my fair share, I have been privy to some very interesting blogalogues, rife with wit and insight. It feels a little bit like stealing. Like pirating intelligence.

But goddammit already. The more they write about it, the more impassioned they become, and the more impassioned they become, the sloppier they get. On some blogs it’s like everybody is shoving their version of truth down each other’s throats.

To what end, I ask?

Don’t get me wrong. Discussion is good, respectful disagreement is even better. People should have these kinds of discussions. But for as much as I hate to be a hater, I’m starting to hate when people talk about truth in art. It feels like lies.

Or maybe it’s just that I don’t believe it. I can suspend my disbelief for the most absurd of absurd, but when you start telling me things like “art is useless without truth,” the first word in my head is bullshit. Why is it useless? For that matter, why is truth useful?

I think what gets me is the fact that there is this overbearing pretension in that mindset. What a lot of these bloggers are doing is separating their artistic working life from their real life, putting it on a pedestal, and saying, “look how much truth this contains!” I can almost guarantee that when you inject truth into your work, that truth is fake truth. Which is both amusingly ironic and maddeningly comforting. To me, at least.

But that’s what it’s all about. Truth is subjective. Truth is everywhere and in everything, very much in the same sense that art is everywhere and in everything. And aside from blunt scientific fact (as it is, not necessarily as we know it), there is no such thing as universal truth. Because truth is what you believe to be true. You can take that as deep or as shallow as you like, but that’s the bottom line. There are certainly things that certain amounts of people happen to agree upon, and artists like to tap into these things in order to reach out and communicate to people. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s part of the fun of creating a piece of art. But there is no be-all/end-all truth with a capital T, and there is certainly no more truth in any work of art than there is in the dried-up leaf still attached to the plant in the corner of my apartment that I haven’t watered since April. So — bloggers — artists — let’s take that pressure off each other, huh?