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“DECEPTION” IN CONTEMPORARY ART

L. Partin

Abstract

In 2004, Peter Goldie accentuated a common feature of certain contemporary artworks and social psychology experiments: the „deception” of viewers and, respectively, of participants in the experiment. Peter Goldie uses the term „deception” for the strategy of social psychologists, because the entire experiment is based on a hoax (in Milgram’s experiment on obedience, for example). The participants fallaciously believe until the end of the event that they are taking part in a general knowledge test, playing by the predetermined coercive norms of a game. If participants would have been initially informed that the test is actually about the verification of obedience and not general knowledge, obedience wouldn’t have insinuated itself during the experiment. Some contemporary artworks are also focusing on “deception” in order to have the desired impact. Peter Goldie mentions a project by Santiago Sierra. When the invitees showed up, in 2002, at the opening of an exhibition in London, they found the entrance of the gallery covered. The artist, finally appeared and told the impatient viewers that this was the exhibition, titled “Space Closed by Corrugated Metal”. Sierra declared: “It was prompted by events in Argentina, where following the collapse of the peso, banks pulled corrugated sheets across their buildings to stop people from withdrawing their savings”.[1] The Code of Conduct and Ethical Principles of the American Association of Psychologists specifies that for psychologists the “deception” of participants is not desirable, but ethically acceptable when alternatives don’t exist and when it is used in the name of science and education. Goldie extrapolates this justification and analyses Sierra’s performances from an aesthetic point of view. In art, Goldie asserts, “deception” is acceptable on an aesthetical level if it is well executed. The analogy between the two domains regarding the ethical and, respectively, aesthetical acceptability of “deception” is consistent with only one exception. In experimental social psychology the “necessity” of this strategy is immediately verifiable. Cognitive bias, obedience, conformism, stereotypes would be impossible to quantify without “disenchantment”. This justifies from an ethical point of view the method. In art we can analyze if it’s clumsily executed, but we cannot verify if there are alternatives. The aesthetic evaluation of a work can’t depend on the “necessity” of “deception”, as Goldie claims. Doubtlessly, “deception” strengthens a work of art, aesthetically. But when is “disenchantment” necessary or unnecessary from an aesthetic point of view and who can determine it? In the same note, Claire Bishop writes in her text, „Artificial Hells” from 2012: „I would argue that unease, discomfort and frustration – along with fear, contradiction, exhilaration and absurdity – can be crucial to any work’s artistic impact. That is not to say that ethics are unimportant in a work of art, nor irrelevant to politics, only that they do not always have to be announced and performed in such a direct and saintly fashion.”

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