Meeting Register Page

Public Books Circle: "Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation" by Antoinette LaFarge

Join Beauvais Lyons, Chancellor's Professor of Art, on April 12, 2023, for an online discussion of Antoinette LaFarge's book, "Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation" hosted by the UT Humanities Center.

About the book:
Stealthily occupying the remote corners of history, literature, and art are curious fabrications that straddle the lines between fact, fiction, and wild imagination — non-existent people and poets, Edgar Allan Poe’s hot-air-balloon to the Moon hoax, crypto-scientific objects like fake skeletons, psycho-geography, faked inventions, and staged anthropological evidence. The shift from the early information age to our “infocalypse” era of rampant misinformation has made this genre of art with a sting in its tale an especially radical form. Cataloging historical projects and those from the late 20th and early 21st century that probe this confusion, LaFarge foregrounds the medium’s potential for run-away creativity. Readers of "Sting in the Tale" will be amused, delighted, and soberly engaged in thinking about what the role of art could be in shaping discord or discourse.

Buy a copy of the book or check it out from the library. Read, enjoy, and then join the book discussion online to hear an expert in the field talk about the major ideas of a text that you have read!

Beauvais Lyons is Chancellor’s Professor and Ellen McClung Berry Professor of Art at UT. His one-person exhibitions have been presented at over 80 galleries and museums across the United States. He has published articles on his work in Archaeology, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Contemporary Impressions, The New Art Examiner, Leonardo and Burnaway. He also has works in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.

Apr 12, 2023 07:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)