Art and Post-Truth: The Copy of the Copy in Beirut
I. The Simulacrum and the Rock in the Age of Art and Post-Truth
We live in the era of the copy of the copy of the copy, where art and post-truth blur together. Baudrillard warned us: the map came before the territory. The image replaced the real. And the real — that lost object — was forgotten somewhere between one scroll and the next.
However, my birds refuse.
They fly over the Raouché — anchored to that specific rock, to that historical weight of Beirut — and at the same time they release their lines to the wind, wanting to be universal, wanting to escape. Therefore, that tension is not weakness. Rather, it is the condition of any art that still breathes: to belong and transcend at the same time.
II. The Godiva Who Refuses Nudity — Art Against Post-Truth
Plato said the body was the prison of the soul.
My Godivas disagree
They do not show the nudity of the body — because what they want to reveal is harder to see: the beauty of the soul. The body becomes a veil. The refusal to show is the very act of showing. It is the deepest nudity — the one with no flesh, but with truth.
In a time when everything is exposed, hiding is a political act.
In an age of post-truth, the soul that resists the direct gaze is more real than anything on the surface.
III. What Is Real: What I Invent in the Post-Truth Era
This is the question that follows me — and that I leave open, like a window:
Is what I invent, real?
Borges said that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of men. But art does the opposite: it multiplies without diluting. Each person who encounters my birds sees a different flight. Each person who looks at the Godivas finds a different soul in the same silence.
What we find ready-made has already been filtered through a thousand gazes,
a thousand interests, a thousand acts of forgetting.
What I invent passes through me — through my pain, my Beirut, my eye that sees birds where others see chaos.
Perhaps the real is this: what resists forgetting.
IV. Art as Testimony — Escaping the Machine of Post-Truth
Indeed, in post-truth, the machine operates at the level of discourse — and that is why discourse cannot beat it.
Art does not argue. And that is precisely why it escapes.
It makes you feel something true before the mind can contest it.
The birds over the Raouché do not ask you to believe in them.
They simply fly.
And the Godivas do not explain the soul.
They veil it — so that you may feel it.
If these birds flew all the way here, perhaps you’d like to see where they land.
→ Explore the complete series at [js.creative.art/works]
→ Follow the creative process on [Instagram @jscreativeart]
— JS Creative Art, Beirut
