An artwork is fake news but not reciprocally.
Information presents itself as objective truth, a look outside the world. Fake News is an attempt to make public opinion believe that an inaccurate fact is true, to serve a political cause, for example, to help a candidate for an election, or to harm a camp in a referendum; or to question a scientific truth, for the greatest benefit of a Church or a party. The Fake News is, therefore, the cancer of democracy, the enemies of progress and knowledge, and they bring misfortune to all the people who believe them.
On the contrary, a work of art does not pretend to represent the truth. It pretends to provide a subjective vision of the world, from the gaze of an artist, an author, generally identified, or at least claimed as anonymous. Fake News, which can only be credible if it can appear to be a fact, without an author, and not a creation of the mind.
Finally, unlike Fake news, the purpose of a work of art is not to deceive, divert, trigger the anger of those who observe it, but to elevate, or at least entertain.
Also, to distinguish Fake News from a work of art, we must first seek to know if it claims to be an objective manifestation of the truth; if so, it is not a work of art. Then we have to find out if we can find its author; if someone claims paternity, it is neither information nor information.
Thus, for example, the radio program announcing in great detail the arrival of the Martians on the streets of New York, broadcast live in the United States on October 30, 1938, was Fake News.
It was Fake News since it went out entirely the imagination of HG Wells, the author of the novel La Guerre des mondes , and that of Orson Welles, the author, among other masterpieces, of Citizen Kane.
This work is now unanimously regarded as an exceptional work of art.
If any work of art is by nature Fake News, any Fake News can hope to become a work of art, if it assumes itself as such, if it ceases to claim itself as information, if its goal is not to deceive or to do evil, but to make people think, distract or at least make people laugh.
Le Journal des arts
