With Apologies

...to M Magritte.

The Treachery Of Images - 1928-29
("This is not a pipe")

His detractors all said, "Of course it's a pipe, you fool..."

And Magritte then challenged them - if it's really a pipe, then you should be able to pick it up fill it with tobacco.

"The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe?  No, it's just a representation, is it not?  So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!"

The point is semantic (even a little pedantic maybe), but he was warning us that what we see is not necessarily what's real.  And he was doing that just as advertising was coming of age, and a good 5 years before Goebbels raised it all to a deadly art.

Great art is the act of telling lies in a perfectly truthful way.