Lies in Art

This paper aims to show that any account of how artworks lie must acknowledge (I) artworks can lie at different levels of their content: what I call ‘surface’ and ‘deep’, and (II) 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.University of Cambridge School of Arts and Humanities Full Doctoral Award Peterhouse Gunn Fun