wolly.green
Permanent Fixture
- MBTI
- ENTP
- Enneagram
- 4w5
Hi everyone! Its been a while since I've posted here! And I'm back because I need some help. I've just finished writing a few paragraphs for a video I'm about to make, and I want to know whether it makes senses. Is it easy to read or completely convoluted? Thanks so much for your input.
Start!
Starting in the Renaissance, bourgeois high art began to romanticize, even fetishize Platos theory of ideal forms. It was believed that real life is nothing but a shadow. A hollow, incomplete copy of an invisible higher reality. Thus the goal of an artist is not to copy from real life, but rather to peer beyond and press his canvas against the ideal figures of this unseen world. Michelangelo's art captured the human form by pressing his canvas against these ideal figures, thus endowing them with astonishingly large Herculean muscles. This all changed in the nineteenth century however, with the emergence of artistic realism. The greatest champion for realism, Gustave Courbet, believe that painting should not represent ideal forms, but rather should depict reality as it is seen. Realism revolted against idealism, which was perceived as exaggerating the tacky emotionalism and drama of the Renaissance era. It sought to portray real people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoid the unpleasant, sordid aspects of everyday life. Since the rise of abstract approaches in modern art however, realism has now become just one of many stylistic approaches to art!
Artistic realism is a style that attempts to depict reality truthfully without being shallow or artificial. But what exactly is meant by truthful here? A treatise could easily full a small library with philosophical and artistic texts! But instead of diving right in, I want to entertain just one possible interpretation! A piece of art is said to follow realism when all elements within are as realistic as possible. That is, a painting is realistic not only if it depicts something that actually exists, but also if all the details within are as similar to the actual thing as possible. A painting of a flower is realistic if the flower actually exists and if the painting looks exactly like it! Now we can ask an interesting question: how realistic can we make the flower painting? Well, we could imagine developing a new batch of paints that better reflect the colours and textures of actual flowers! We could incorperate or even invent entirely new brush stroke techniques that allow us to paint the small details like veins and pigments that run along a pedals surface. We could even imagine adding a thickening agent so that the paint clumps together into 3 dimensional textures. Whatever improvements we can think of, the answer to the question "how realistic can we make a flower painting" is: as realistic as our knowledge and experience of flowers and paintings will allow. The more knowledge we collect about flowers, paints, paint brushes and various other artistic techniques, the more realistic we can make it. But so what? We already knew that from the start? True, but that isn't the point. The point is that no matter how much knowledge we collect, no matter how detailed our painting becomes, it will never actually become a flower. There will always be details within an actual flower that we can NEVER capture. This is important because knowledge in general has the same characteristic. No matter how much we refine a theory, no matter how long we work on it, a theory never becomes the thing it explains. There are always details in reality that we miss!
Physics is often advertised as the poster boy for humanities deepest, most fundamental store of knowledge. If only there was enough computer power in the world, we could use physics to derive everything that there is to know about the universe! That's how fantastically deep it is! Right? Thank god the field of physics has matured past such juvenile ideas! There are a ton of reasons why they're not even remotely true! And we now know that one of the reasons is that theories are not the things they explain! A theory that describes a law of physics is not a law of physics itself, so there will always be details in reality that we miss. And this remains true no matter how much we refine our scientific techniques! One important and unavoidable consequence of imperfect knowledge is that no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to plan and compensate for every conceivable problem. No matter how meticulously we plan for the future, there will always be something we miss. This may come as difficult, and even terrifying to accept. But the real magnitude of this blindness to the future can be seen to viseral affect when considering the consequences for progress in science.
Again, thank you so much!
Start!
Starting in the Renaissance, bourgeois high art began to romanticize, even fetishize Platos theory of ideal forms. It was believed that real life is nothing but a shadow. A hollow, incomplete copy of an invisible higher reality. Thus the goal of an artist is not to copy from real life, but rather to peer beyond and press his canvas against the ideal figures of this unseen world. Michelangelo's art captured the human form by pressing his canvas against these ideal figures, thus endowing them with astonishingly large Herculean muscles. This all changed in the nineteenth century however, with the emergence of artistic realism. The greatest champion for realism, Gustave Courbet, believe that painting should not represent ideal forms, but rather should depict reality as it is seen. Realism revolted against idealism, which was perceived as exaggerating the tacky emotionalism and drama of the Renaissance era. It sought to portray real people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoid the unpleasant, sordid aspects of everyday life. Since the rise of abstract approaches in modern art however, realism has now become just one of many stylistic approaches to art!
Artistic realism is a style that attempts to depict reality truthfully without being shallow or artificial. But what exactly is meant by truthful here? A treatise could easily full a small library with philosophical and artistic texts! But instead of diving right in, I want to entertain just one possible interpretation! A piece of art is said to follow realism when all elements within are as realistic as possible. That is, a painting is realistic not only if it depicts something that actually exists, but also if all the details within are as similar to the actual thing as possible. A painting of a flower is realistic if the flower actually exists and if the painting looks exactly like it! Now we can ask an interesting question: how realistic can we make the flower painting? Well, we could imagine developing a new batch of paints that better reflect the colours and textures of actual flowers! We could incorperate or even invent entirely new brush stroke techniques that allow us to paint the small details like veins and pigments that run along a pedals surface. We could even imagine adding a thickening agent so that the paint clumps together into 3 dimensional textures. Whatever improvements we can think of, the answer to the question "how realistic can we make a flower painting" is: as realistic as our knowledge and experience of flowers and paintings will allow. The more knowledge we collect about flowers, paints, paint brushes and various other artistic techniques, the more realistic we can make it. But so what? We already knew that from the start? True, but that isn't the point. The point is that no matter how much knowledge we collect, no matter how detailed our painting becomes, it will never actually become a flower. There will always be details within an actual flower that we can NEVER capture. This is important because knowledge in general has the same characteristic. No matter how much we refine a theory, no matter how long we work on it, a theory never becomes the thing it explains. There are always details in reality that we miss!
Physics is often advertised as the poster boy for humanities deepest, most fundamental store of knowledge. If only there was enough computer power in the world, we could use physics to derive everything that there is to know about the universe! That's how fantastically deep it is! Right? Thank god the field of physics has matured past such juvenile ideas! There are a ton of reasons why they're not even remotely true! And we now know that one of the reasons is that theories are not the things they explain! A theory that describes a law of physics is not a law of physics itself, so there will always be details in reality that we miss. And this remains true no matter how much we refine our scientific techniques! One important and unavoidable consequence of imperfect knowledge is that no matter how hard we try, it is impossible to plan and compensate for every conceivable problem. No matter how meticulously we plan for the future, there will always be something we miss. This may come as difficult, and even terrifying to accept. But the real magnitude of this blindness to the future can be seen to viseral affect when considering the consequences for progress in science.
Again, thank you so much!
Last edited:
And I loved the example you gave of trying to give a realistic representation of a flower, and all the ensuing complications associated with the concept of a realistic representation. And the parallel with scientific theories. It's all very well done and very clear.
