Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Foreman

Foreman’s line lands like a trapdoor under the audience’s most pious assumption: that art’s job is to “tell the truth” about life. Coming from an avant-garde playwright who built a career on fractured attention, stage noise, and deliberate anti-naturalism, the provocation isn’t a shrug at reality; it’s a warning about realism as a comfort genre. “Absolutely truthful” is the tell. He’s not claiming art can’t be honest, only that total truth is a fantasy - and fantasies have politics.

The intent is partly aesthetic, partly defensive. Foreman is arguing for theater as construction, not transcription. Even the most documentary-minded work edits, frames, compresses time, assigns causality, and turns experience into legible form. The subtext: the minute you make something watchable, you’ve already lied. Not maliciously - structurally. Narrative requires selection; selection implies bias; bias produces a version of life that feels coherent enough to sell tickets.

There’s also a sly jab at audiences who demand “relatability” as proof of value. Foreman suggests that what we call truthful art is often just art that mirrors our habits of perception. His theater tried to break those habits, to make spectators catch themselves in the act of wanting the world to resolve into a plot.

Context matters: postwar experimental theater, the rise of mass media, and a culture increasingly trained to confuse representation with reality. Foreman’s claim isn’t anti-art. It’s pro-awareness: if art can’t be absolutely truthful, it can still be piercingly truthful about the fact that we’re always watching through a frame.