Jonathan Biss. Photo source: Colbert Artists, courtesy of McKnight Center for the Performing Arts/Robin Herrod.
In Sunday’s (3/1) New York Times, classical pianist Jonathan Biss writes, “The truth is under attack…. We swim in an ocean of social media rife with falsehoods, promoted by algorithms that serve only profitability…. The performing arts, with their warm embrace of subjectivity, might not seem the most likely corrective amid this crisis. But they have much to teach us about the notion of truth. There is no great performance—not even a theatrical one whose surface is, by design, artifice—that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work…. A truthful performance must be sincere. Sincerity requires openness and vulnerability … To tell the truth on that stage you must leave your vanity in the green room. Sincerity is essential, but by itself it is insufficient. For a performance to be truthful, it must reveal not just the performer’s truth but the truth of the material being played…. Art has the power to show us what the truth looks like. It is complex and elusive. The search for it is where true beauty and moral strength lie.”
