Chapter 4 - A Good Fantasy

 Chapter 4  - A Good Fantasy 

 

“I have Abandoned my search for Truth, and am now looking for a Good Fantasy”   Ashleigh Brilliant

 

 

It is generally assumed, and generally with good reason, that the historical course of Homo Sapiens (= “man”+ “wise”) runs from ignorance to wisdom, from speculation to fact, from lawlessness to law. In most cases this seems to have been so, and historical examples are too legion to bother to list. 

 

But it is not always so.

 

Picture this:

 

An entire industry of artisans, all dedicated to producing with great skill and meticulous detail attention a certain item reflecting Truth.

 

The Truth is there for all to see, yet the Truth cannot be captured, and so it is the task of these artisans to reproduce Truth with all the verisimilitude their skills and labours can muster. 

 

For their task the best of such artisans are well paid and are in great demand, acquiring fame on the way.

 

Their guild is established, schools teaching the craft exist, and their role is as recognised as the sculptor tailor and jeweler.

 

Then, one day, a *machine* is invented that can create this item, in finer detail than can the greatest artisan, in mere minutes. 

 

The machine, inexpensive, renders the ordinary skill of the great mass of these artisans obsolete.

 

The artisans in this tale sought to represent Truth, and had done for centuries, but suddenly Truth could be represented, far more truthfully, by a machine.

 

So what did the artisans do?

Did they surrender?

Did they seek out other employment?

Did they pursue Truth some other way?

 

No

 

They embraced falsehood, calling it their *personal* Truth.

 

In a word, they embraced *Impressionism*.

 

For this tale is the tale of the Artist, the Painter, the Portraitist, and the new machine that replaced their skill at representing Truth was, of course, the Camera.

 

It is no coincidence that no sooner than cameras began appearing in a Sears catalogue that artists invented *out of thin air* the fanciful notion that their “impression” of a scene was somehow more real than the scene itself, and having unhinged themselves from any aspiration to actually represent reality they found themselves in an entirely invented discipline of reality misrepresentation, distortion, opacification and exaggeration, eventually leading to the abstract 20^th century works about which both nothing and anything can be said.

 

As Ashleigh Brilliant famously noted on one of his famous cartoons: “I have abandoned my search for Truth, and am now looking for a good Fantasy”.

 

Like the fabled prisoner who, after decades of imprisonment and is finally released into freedom sunlight and fresh air, decides instead to turn around back into his cell, to dwell in the confines he found comforting rather journey into a freedom he knew not.

 

I will contend that the French artists of the Salon Des Refusees in 1869 were not the only ones ever to turn away from truth in order to promote a self-serving fantasy, but they were perhaps the most graphic example.

 

From Verisimilitude to Vagary: The Artist’s Retreat from Truth

It is a deeply ingrained assumption—so deeply embedded in the modern mind as to go virtually unquestioned—that the trajectory of human history, and of Homo sapiens in particular, has been a gradual ascent from darkness into light. The very name we have given ourselves—Homo sapiens, “the wise man”—suggests an inherent teleology: from ignorance to wisdom, from mythos to logos, from chaos to order. The Enlightenment thinkers canonised this view, seeing humanity as a creature progressing from superstition toward reason, from alchemy toward chemistry, from oracles to the scientific method.

And indeed, in many domains, this general trajectory holds true. One need not belabour the innumerable examples: from the codification of Roman law to the periodic table, from the calculus of Newton and Leibniz to the germ theory of Pasteur, from medieval trial by ordeal to modern jurisprudence. Human beings, over time, have replaced folklore with falsifiability, replaced rituals with replicable results.

But not always.

There are moments—curious, disquieting moments—in which history seems to run in reverse: where the attainment of clearer truth precipitates not gratitude, but resentment; not advancement, but retreat. There are episodes in which the revelation of truth is not welcomed as a liberation, but resisted as an affront. And perhaps no case exemplifies this paradox more vividly than the one found in the world of the painter, the artist, the visual craftsman of the pre-modern era.

Imagine this:

An entire class of skilled artisans, trained over generations in the delicate art of depicting the visible world with exactitude. They study perspective, anatomy, lighting, pigment chemistry, geometry, and composition. Their works aspire to capture not only the form, but the essence of things. Portraiture is especially esteemed: to represent the human face with psychological depth and physical accuracy was seen as the very pinnacle of artistic attainment. These men and women do not claim to create reality, but to re-present it—to hold a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet put it.

This was the painter’s vocation from Giotto to Titian, from Caravaggio to Ingres. Their craft was an epistemological one: to imitate the truth of the visible world as faithfully as oil on canvas could permit. Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, argued that painting was a “science,” for it required not only manual dexterity but the systematic study of optics, anatomy, and perspective.

And for centuries, these artists were revered. Their skills were rare, their works expensive, their patrons powerful. To commission a portrait was to capture posterity. To be painted was to be affirmed as someone who mattered. Artists sat alongside sculptors, goldsmiths, and architects as the secular clergy of visual truth.

But then came the machine.

In 1839, Louis Daguerre’s photographic process was unveiled to the French Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts. A silver-coated copper plate, treated with iodine vapour and developed with mercury fumes, could fix an image drawn by light itself. The daguerreotype was born—and with it, the end of the painter’s monopoly on visual truth.

In an instant, the artisan was outdone. The machine could produce in minutes an image of greater fidelity, greater precision, and greater reproducibility than even the most accomplished painter could achieve in weeks. Worse still, the machine required no intuition, no training in composition, no apprenticeship under a master. It required only chemicals, patience, and a steady hand.

Faced with this technological insult, how did the artist respond? Did he yield? Did he adapt? Did he retrain, finding a new medium in which to pursue the same ancient goal of truthfully representing reality?

No.

He inverted the very terms of the craft.

Having been displaced in representing truth, the artist declared that truth was no longer the object. It was impression, sensation, subjectivity, vision, emotion. These became the new currency. The rise of the camera coincided almost precisely with the rise of Impressionism—an aesthetic movement that claimed to offer not a depiction of what the eye sees, but of what the soul feels. Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) became emblematic not only of a new style, but of a new ethic: the artist was no longer a servant of truth, but a conjurer of inner worlds.

It is no coincidence that the Salon des Refusés—the 1863 exhibition sanctioned by Napoleon III to display works rejected by the official Paris Salon—included many who would later be canonised as Impressionist pioneers. Manet, Cézanne, Pissarro—each was, in his own way, repudiating the demand for faithful representation in favour of stylised distortion, visible brushwork, and emotional suggestion.

In short, having been bested at the game of truth, the artists changed the rules.

The implications of this are not merely artistic. They are philosophical. For what we witness in this pivot is a larger phenomenon: when truth becomes too confronting, or too difficult to attain, human beings often reframe the failure as a virtue. Nietzsche called this Umwertung aller Werte—a transvaluation of values. The renunciation of objectivity becomes an embrace of subjectivity. The pursuit of clarity is mocked as naïve. The inability to capture reality is recast as a freedom from its constraints.

As Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” In that one epigram lies the collapse of mimesis into solipsism.

And so began a long 20th century in which art divorced itself from truth altogether. From Cubism to Dadaism, from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, the prevailing view was that art need no longer reflect anything external. The artist was no longer the mirror-holder, but the oracle of a private reality—what Susan Sontag later called the “artist as metaphysical hero.”

By the time Jackson Pollock was flinging paint onto canvas in the 1950s, the game was up. There was no longer even the pretence of representation. And thus we arrived at a curious impasse: the public, unable to distinguish genius from gibberish, grew cynical. The very concept of art became contested. Tom Wolfe, in his caustic The Painted Word (1975), noted that modern art had become “a species of writing” in which the theory mattered more than the object. The gallery label was more important than the canvas.

Ashleigh Brilliant, with typical pith, once scrawled on one of his famous postcards: “I have surrendered my search for Truth and am now looking for a good Fantasy.” He meant it humorously. But it captures precisely what happened when artists turned away from veracity and toward ambiguity. Having lost the race for visual accuracy, they raced instead toward interpretive opacity.

It was, in many ways, the prisoner’s dilemma. Offered escape into the sunlit world of objective beauty—a world now inhabited by the lens rather than the brush—the artist retreated instead into the cell of subjectivity. Like Plato’s cave-dweller who chooses the flickering shadows over the blinding light of the real, they returned to the comforting illusions of their own invention.

This was not merely aesthetic cowardice. It was ideological recalibration.

And thus, I would argue, the Salon des Refusés of 1863 represents more than a turning point in art history. It marks a civilisational metaphor: when truth becomes inconvenient, human beings are capable of convincing themselves that fantasy is preferable. The artist's surrender is a microcosm of a broader cultural pattern: one in which sincerity gives way to irony, clarity to cleverness, and representation to relativism.

But the truth remains. It is still there, just as it was in the 15th century, awaiting depiction. The camera did not kill the truth. It merely revealed who was still interested in pursuing it—and who wasn’t.

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