Not sure about that. There is a great deal of just competent, mediocre work that makes many people, including the artists, happy. But then, who can tolerate unremitting, unforgiving truth?
That's a good question.
However, fooling the self comes on many levels: from health, love, and through to eternity, we all have to come to some personally calibrated level of certainty about life and our place within it.
Fortunately, we are fallible and that gives us the ability to turn on the force shields whenever the need is too strong to handle. That, though, doesn't imply that they can be kept permanently activated. If only for the purpose of recharging our own batteries, do we open our minds again and face whatever out there that it is that we fear. We simply can't avoid it, and perhaps the easiest illustration is with our own photographs: it's often better to make one and sit on it for a few days (without looking at it again) before showing it. For there's a caveat here: incubate for too long, and with familiarity, everything becomes almost as acceptable as everything else we have done.
(As with a point made in another thread about colour images and their reality, with the passage of time the evidence becomes the fact. A statement that the photographer was the only one who knew what things looked like at the time of exposure is unbelievable: just look at old family snaps you haven't see for a while, and when confronted with images of your mother or anybody else from a long time ago, tell me that the picture is exactly as you remember that person. Of course it's not! Your memory is very unreliable. You will have recalled a person either taller, shorter, fatter or more thin and almost never as within the slice of age that the picture reveals, just like some Dorian Gray truth you forgot to remember.)
So in conclusion, the question you posed has to be answered by stating that nobody can withstand permanent, clear and brutally honest self-appraisal.
Rob
