With regard to art, the artist has a responsibility to tell the truth. But in art, there is an important distinction between truth as actuality and truth as verisimilitude. The fact that something actually happened which is depicted by an artist does not make it truthful, in the artistic sense. Truth in art is more complicated. Truth must be fairly typical of reality, must express its essence, not just its appearance. Since experience is infinite in time and at any given moment, the artist must select an infinitely small slice of experience to depict. The artist has to make sure that that slice is set in proper context. For a thing is what it is because of its connections to other things. To sever it from its connections is to destroy it. So if an artist fails to set what it depicts in its real context, it may very well be a truth, in one sense, but it is a very distorted truth, a misleading truth, and a truth that misleads cannot be an artistic truth.
Just as a simple illustration: A photographer decides to depict a nose. By shooting the nose at an extreme close-up and then choosing to shoot at extreme angle, leaving out most of the face, one will get a very distorted view of what the nose actually looks. If one protests, the artist might insist that this is
a truthful depiction of the nose, and that the photographer has in no way touched the nose or touched the nose. Or the photographer might shoot a face with bulging eyes, extremely contorted face, veins popping out. The face looks grotesque, threatening. The photographer might have carefully excluded the hands of another person who is actually strangling the person with the grotesque face. Does it make a difference? Is the artist not violating truth?
The artist may say “I choose to select my subject matter, and as long as it is real, you cannot say I lie.” Those who describe only backward African-American behavior and attitudes in art, literature, movies, and who further do so without a real context, may be describing actual events and, people, but by their selective examples and their failure to show the forces which shape that behavior and those attitudes, portraying only the bulging eyes while leaving out the choking hands, they are seriously distorting truth, and in the case of African-American people, their “art” betrays the liberation movement. Furthermore, when African-American males are almost never depicted in a favorable light, when their tenderness, their capacity for love for their family, their wives, their children, their neighbors and friends, when that is totally suppressed – as it is in film, on stage, in books, in the media, TV, etc. – then works of art that, although faithfully reflecting a tiny slice of reality, objectively contribute to a distorted, untruthful image of reality and can have no justification.
An artist not only describes. Consciously or unconsciously, the artist interprets reality. The artist has an obligation to illuminate that interpretation with understanding.
It is an elementary dictum of literature and drama that actions, dramatic incident, must be motivated, and that motivation must be successfully communicated to the reader/audience. The depiction by literature and drama of a mindless or villainous cruelty by African-American males, leaving out the savagery inflicted upon them, leaving out their agony, no matter what the intent of the artist, perpetrates a lie and abets in the oppression of all African-American people, women as well as men.
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