Colette Olive: "Fake News! Thinking Through the Reliability of Art"

Colette Olive, University of Leeds: "Fake News! Thinking Through the Reliability of Art"

Abstract
Some artworks are designed to inform. Often, such art has activist aims or intentions. Data, evidence, and investigation play an increasingly central role in the practise of contemporary artists and collectives like Ai Weiwei, Forensic Architecture, Guerilla Girls. But information has working its way into popular art too. At the Governors Ball festival in 2025, Hozier performed a single from his new album in front of a series of stats. The series of inordinate and ever-rising numbers represented the Lockheed Martin share price, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the various wealthy nations, the number of children displaced by violence and conflict around the world, amongst other socio-political crises. Assuming that these artists are trying to overcome some kind of epistemic deficit in their audience, the question becomes: what makes them a good source of information? Why should I rely on popstars for reliable data? When Bob Dylan released Hurricane, he was praised with raising the profile of Reuben Carter's plight. But Dylan—who co-wrote the song with a playwright—gets several facts of the case wrong. Perhaps 'Reuben Carter was falsely tried' but he wasn't "far away in another part of town" at the time of the alleged murder. This paper defends a model that allows us to discern between artworks that are reliable information sources, and those which are not. It does so by looking at recent work in the epistemology of fake news. I suggest we think about the epistemic pedigree of artworks, as a way of assessing their relevant merits and demerits. An artwork's positive or negative epistemic standing is then a function of the quality of their methods for gathering facts and information. Applied to the case of artworks, this allows us to see why Dylan might not be quite as reliable as AI.