Casey Kaplan
More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness presents work by some of today’s most accomplished and promising international artists who are examining our shifting experience of reality. Over the past century, during a period of unprecedented technological change and global social upheaval, once-established beliefs, or “truths,” have been cast into doubt, changing and shaping our understanding and experience of reality. Through diverse media and in unexpected ways, this exhibition explores the impact and role of deception, play, memory, power, simulation, and new technologies on art and everyday life.
The exhibition proposes that we now live in an “Age of Truthiness,” a time when our understanding of the truth is no longer bound to anything tangible, provable, or factual.
In 2005, Stephen Colbert, comedian and host of the popular satirical news program, “The Colbert Report,” coined the word “truthiness” and brought it to the forefront of the English lexicon. Defined by the American Dialect Society as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true,” the notion of “truthiness” quickly caught hold and it became Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2006. By presenting art that reveals, confronts, and questions the nature of reality in an age when the relationships between truth and fiction have never been less definitive, More Real? explores our constantly changing shared sense of what is real.