Art is Fiction

I believe that art is fictitious. Art re/presentations are provisional, entirely arbitrary (even those that seem to be entirely contingent, which brings in the problem of In Cold Blood and other hybrids), and thus they are not “wrong” when the depictions do not correspond well with reality, that is, when depictions are unreliable, which would happen with, say, police photos.

For these kinds of arbitrary manipulations to be possible or feasible, for them to be sufficient for the artist's purpose (e.g., picking the name of a protagonist, details of his or her description, the color of the sky in a landscape or the number of trees or branches on the trees in a painting, etc.), they have to be detachable from their referent. They have to become ends and interests in themselves. The curve of the naked body has to be pleasing apart from the scene depicted (e.g., Bronzino's Luxury, Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, etc.), the style of delineation has to be pleasing in itself (cf. e.g., drawings by Ingres, Schiele, Hockney, Rivers, etc.), etc.

I find that these visibly stylized portrayals strongly suggests that the formal qualities of works of art supersede the referential qualities: the beauty of the shapes, colors, diction, disposition of actors on the stage, and all the other stuff become the end, and the represented subject becomes one of the formal elements in the work. (BTW, who remembers the political ramifications of the Raft of the Medusa? of the Oath of the Horatii? Gone, dissipated. All that's left is admiration of the artistic skills on display. Which, moreover, is part of why I really like Christo's work: their awesome scale, audacity, and clear visual presence could only be produced by the other part of his work, the tedious efforts to get permissions, variances, etc.)

In other words, the underlying mechanism or structure of art is formalism and fiction.