When art can't lie

Abstract

Pre-philosophically an artwork can lie in virtue of some (perhaps successfully realized) authorial intention that the audience comes to accept as true something that the author believes to be false. This thought forces a confrontation with the debate about the relation between the interpretation of a work and the intentions of its author. Anti-intentionalist theories of artwork meaning, which divorce work meaning from the actual authors intentions, cannot license the judgment that an artwork lies. But if artwork lying is a genuine possibility then anti-intentionalism must be rejected as false.