Everybody lies: The ethics of social practice

Whilst ideas of ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ are used almost interchangeably in everyday conversation, this article seeks to make a clear distinction between them: morality is about social interaction whilst ethics is about fidelity to a truth. This distinction is used to inform questions around social practice. The temptation for social practice is to justify itself in terms of morality: the pragmatic difference it makes in the public sphere by way of its virtuous interventions. The downfall of this temptation is that it can lead, in fact, to a depoliticization of art. It is my contention that politics proper (in art, as elsewhere) is about radical change rather than manoeuvring within the bounds of what already exist. This is the register of the ethical.