"On Media" Response: "Truthiness"

This short essay had some very interesting ideas on media. One that struck me the most when I read it was Hovagimyan’s assertion that “meaning for any art work is a communication process, a shared tribal agreement on the meaning of any icon, symbol, etc.” (117). At first I thought this kind of absurd – everybody agrees on what they’re seeing, all the time? Any art work is just universally seen as the same thing? Because whether you’re discussing a photo, a painting, a film, a dance etc. usually there are at least a couple different interpretations and messages received by the audience.

But then I thought it about some more, and realized that the core of what he is saying is mostly correct. There are some things, some huge “icons” and “symbols” that are usually accepted to mean the same thing. For instance, an image of a skull is never thought to represent ideas of love. If you consider the arts the author mentions, namely photography and film, in terms of being a part of a “tribal agreement,” I think that most people agree that these art forms are supposed to contain the most truth.

I feel that people believe they are promised some kind of truth in these “realistic” art forms –photography and film. When these artists began to mess around with that expectation audiences got a little upset and a little disturbed – possibly by the notion that one could never really be sure whether what they were seeing was true or not. In 1858 Henry Peach Robinson created a photograph that was alarming at the time because it wasn’t real. His Fading Away depicts a young girl dying of tuberculosis. It was posed, and that’s enough unreality, but Robinson also took several different pictures and combined them into this one (a “photomontage”). 

People were getting invested in this young girl’s plight, only to realize that it was just another story they were being told. So what can artists do with the idea of “truth” in these hypothetically realistic mediums? I think any artist who decided to do something detached from reality, or surreal would get a bigger reaction from their audience if they did it in one of these mediums. We see a Dali painting and know that this scene never occurred, because it’s painted and any painting, whether based off of reality or not ultimately comes just from the mind of the painter. But a photo or a film is capturing real time and real objects. We instinctively trust these images and when they are manipulated at all the response is stronger and the feeling of unease or curiosity increases. Photographers and filmmakers use this concept to their advantage a lot, I think, and decide to give us reality, surrealism or something posing as one or the other that we have to define for ourselves. (And that’s pretty exciting!)