Art represents truth in a way that facts can not. Facts are unbiased: as a result, some aspects of the "truth" are lost when a point is made to be absolutely objective with the final record. The inverse of this is also true: in the case of every event where "you had to be there" to truly have all the information, it is impossible to get the full picture if all you have are the objective facts. The reason so many curricula are terrible and horrifically boring is because they are little more than a collection of facts with the occasional bit of flavor text. They lack that human element that elevates "fact" to "truth".
To have a really good teacher is to have truth rather than facts. It's not that Mr. Wilson makes Math fun, what he does is he takes these things and looks at them from a subjective viewpoint. He looks at them from his actual, human perspective. Any way you look at it, facts do not become interesting until your humanity can form an opinion on them. You could see a fact about how long a lion's mane jellyfish is in your spare time and think "wow, that's really interesting", but chances are, you could have been fed those very same sentences by a teacher in class, but forgot because of the context the info was delivered in.
Picasso stated that his paintings are "of what he has found, not what he is looking for". He 'did not understand' the importance placed on research by modern art for one simple reason: he didunderstand that truth does not necessarily have to be factual. "Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for." In other words, there could be several inaccuracies regarding the portrayed event. However, this is irrelevant to a certain degree, because he wasn't trying to paint facts, he was painting 'the facts as he saw them', because that is more or less the foundation of truth. Truth is a lens, and a lop-sided one at that: if one's bias is strong enough, it becomes possible to denystone-cold facts, based entirely on the grounds that they contradict "the truth". That the truth is very obviously so easily corrupted is why it is infinitely more dangerous. Facts are incorruptible, but Truth is infallible.
From a certain point of view, art can be seen as more "true" than the world we actually see before us. This is because the image combines both the real and the subjective; what was perceived, but also how it was perceived. The latter aspect is a valuable form of documentation in itself, because it is a reflection of how something "truly" was at the time. Toulouse-Lautrec's "At the Moulin Rouge" is a famous example of what I'm talking about. If it weren't for the painting, then for all we would know the joint could have been as prestigious and lovely as members of the high life would have the common man believe. However, we know because of analysis that the painting portrays the atmosphere, giving form to the very context of the situation, and suddenly the classy bar is caked in a surreal, green haze, jagged angles and inconsistent perspective activating the same feelings in our brain that we would've felt if we'd been there, in the actual bar as someone who had the full context of the situation. Similar to how a stressful situation can make unchanged objects somehow look completely different to our eyes, or people can "look" different after you learn something new about them, whether that be good or bad-- almost as if they suddenly had been painted in a different light. Aristotle believed in something similar: "through imitation, through art, (...) people could come to understand concepts, feelings, situations, and ideas that they would otherwise not understand."
On a personal level, these ideas that I've proposed I feel have some amount of hold on my work already. For example, my "Jungle Courtyard" composition is to its cover artwork what "At the Moulin Rouge" was to the artist's predispositions towards what the painting represented; I firmly believe that the song represents the image fully and totally. In my own mind, the combined visuals of the wooden fence enclosing all this lush plant life, the tree-like plant poking out from beneath a blanket of ivy leaves lining the dilapidated confines of the poolside area-- to me, this is what that sounded like. A sealed off ecosystem, born amongst evidence of a time long past, flourishing. Mysterious, a little sad, almost, but very mystical and intriguing.
My family's dilapidated poolside area just out the back of my house was the subject of the photo, and it looked the way it did because Summer hadn't yet started, so we didn't believe there was much need to do anything about it yet. The reason everything looks so lush and vibrant is we'd had one of those rainy days where for some reason the sky dials back on the blues and cranks the global red and green values up by eleven percent. Those are the facts. The effect that everything becoming so green after the rain had on the fence was it actually looked somewhat brown again, and almost waterlogged like a rainforest. The fact that everything was so green caused all these weeds and ivy leaves to look so beautiful and fantastic that I had to get a photo of the view. That is the truth. Neither of these things are technically incorrect, however only one of them is based on hard, statistical evidence. The other's basis lies entirely within personal beliefs, but because of its subjective nature can't technically be disproven. The same thing goes for the position I'd taken regarding the composition I created.
Art is inherently linked to the concept of truth, because both of them are rooted in the subjective. Because of this link, there are times when art can be "truer" than factual recordings. Art draws heavily from the observations the human mind makes about the world, combining the perceived and how the object was perceived. If the artist is skilled enough, they can find a way to give the viewer context without a single word, as with Toulouse-Lautrec's "Moulin Rouge" painting. It all comes down to that human element. With my own music, I have demonstrated that it is possible to do something similar using audio. In the future, I'd like to do something like that again, too.
