Summer Show

“Alternative facts are not facts: they’re falsehoods.”

Thus spoke, Chuck Todd, MSNBC’s Meet the Press anchor, on January 22nd 2017 when Senior Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway challenged his live interrogation. The exchange made international headlines just months after the Oxford English Dictionary declared on November 16th Post-Truth the Word of 2016. Earlier that month, Independent columnist Matthew Norman wrote, “The truth has become so devalued that what was once the gold standard of political debate is now worthless currency.” 

That was the year of an infamous British referendum and notorious US presidential candidacy. The 2016 lexicographers then explained how both events accelerated dual post-truth discourses. The thing is the term did not appear magically in 2016. In 2004, author Ralph Keyes dedicated an entire book to the idea, The Post Truth Era, and the concept stretches even farther back to 1992 when an Academy Award winning, Serbian American playwright, Steve Tesich animated his take on the Iran Contra scandal and the Gulf War thus, “We, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.”

Are we still in that post-truth dispensation? Is artificial intelligence its most recent horseman of the apocalypse? AI is certainly portended like an advent of Armageddon, even though it has been with us since we first logged on. In 2024, Instagram influencers who look like people don’t have to be people, deep fake photos of a bigoted presidential candidate in the company of grinning African American supporters circulate, or an edited portrait of a renowned conservative family is jettisoned from respectable news sites. We can be excused for asking, “What is real anymore?” Perhaps, then, it is really time for a reality check. 

David McAlmont

The Summer Show 2023 was held at Dora House and it featured work by more than 50 members of the Society selected by 2023 guest judge Edward Bulmer. Click here to see the exhibition.