Art is a creation that is based on human memory, which is, as you already know, imperfect and highly selective. Why claim that artists “lie”? They can’t wring more out of themselves than what they are given to work with. Our memories are selective, and so art becomes selective. Our memories do not always preserve all details, and so art leaves out things as well. Our memories may trick us – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It might cause us to see things in a different light, and that might turn out to be exactly the light we need in order to understand something.
I think it is dangerous to blow things out of proportion. This particular discussion was blown out of proportion years and years ago, and the mistake has not yet been fully mended. Art is essentially an attempt at understanding ourselves. And since we are flawed, art is flawed. Art is one of the ways in which we interpret the world – which we can only do at our own pace and by our own standards – and it should not be over-inflated and represented as something it isn’t. Art is part of humanity’s collective memory, and each piece of artwork stems from one artist’s individual memory, and is added to our shared store upon completion.
In short, art and memory are tightly linked. Why complain that art “fakes”, when memory tricks us into only remembering a few, select events out of a whole chain, or believing in something that never actually happened? Even if you were to attempt to give a minute by minute account of what you did just an hour ago, you’d end up filling it with irregularities and “lies”, because your mind isn’t hot-wired for such a thing. The memory must necessarily be selective in order not to over-exert itself. And we rely on memory in artistic production, so the final product must necessarily be coloured by its workings.