In Practice: Total Disbelief

<p>Art has served belief for a very long time. In the wake of a vast historical trove of devotional objects, religious subject matter, pseudo-religious spectatorship, and trompe-l’oeil trickery, a broad swath of recent art based in trust, tenuous faith, or the suspension of disbelief fans out. Near the end of the last century, photo-documents asked viewers to believe that some of conceptual art’s most important gestures actually happened, while in the last twenty to thirty years works of autofiction, parafiction, and straight-up fiction have exploited our own skepticism and naivete by intentionally introducing the unbelievable into the realm of the real. And as it goes for <em>X-Files</em> fans: we want to believe…</p>