Art for art's sake...?

Oh, good. Whinging about "the art world." I love nothing so much as inverse snobbery based on half-understood arguments that were settled nearly a century ago and that nobody's been adding to in decades. Contemporary art is without question the most open and inclusive discipline in the humanities (which are themselves derided for their openness by many in the sciences), embracing a range of practices from straight-up perceptual painting and figurative sculpture to ephemeral and even virtual actions, interactions, and propositions. When one person expresses a personal preference for one form or another, they are, I can assure you, expressing only that: a personal preference. Your coworker may just be a bit of a rube. The art teacher might have meant one of several things. Certain representational painters place a great deal of emphasis on real-world perception ("painting from life"), and she may have been referring only to your reliance on photographs. A photograph renders flat a scene that has real depth, that changes with time and with your own physical relationship to it. It gives you an image, rather than requiring you to make one. Perceptual painting is trickier, and many people value it more. Scads of successful painters work directly from photographs, however (this to distinguish from painters who might use multiple photographs as references), it's just that they usually have a specific reason for doing so. Think about Gerhard Richter's labored recreations of newspaper photographs or Elizabeth Peyton's wonky reworkings of tabloid imagery—both want their audience to recognize the photographic source of their images, with the idea that this will cause us to think in some way about our relationship to those images. Paintings that are simply illustrative or decorative are fine—as illustration or decoration. We all like them, but there's only so much you can say about them. Some people are content to contemplate things like composition and framing and the like ad infinitum, a lot of others find that avenue terribly boring. Again, personal preference. And though you don't come right out and say it, if there's any anxiety about what you're calling "realism" versus abstraction, I'll just throw it out there that a dominant theoretical position since at least the eighties has been that there's no such thing as "true" abstraction anymore. When someone endeavors to make an "abstract" painting, they are in fact reproducing a set of forms and conventions established in the first half of the 20th Century. Therefore any new "abstract" painting is actually a representation of an abstract painting. Do with that what you will.

The most important thing in art is the frame. Frank Zappa said this in The Real Frank Zappa Book, though I doubt he was the first to think of it. This expresses a fairly common view of art: an object is art because someone intends it to be seen that way—by calling it that, hanging it in a gallery, performing it in front of other people, etc. Most often creator of the object intends it to be seen as art, and creates the object specifically for that purpose. But sometimes someone finds an object that is not originally art and turns it into art by putting a frame on it. A beautiful object found in nature, like a sea shell, is not art. A utilitarian man-made object, like a toilet, is not art either. But if Marcel Duchamp signs his name on it and puts it in a museum, that's art (though it may not be good art). "Artness" is not determined by content. What this means for you: if you think your realistic paintings have something to say, and for that reason should be considered art, then you're right. They might be bad art (if their content isn't interesting), but if you intend them to be art, no one else can tell you they're not.

Don't listen to the pretentious art-pretenders. As an art history major, I've had to deal with a lot of people with their noses high-in-the-air, unimpressed by anything they might consider too mainstream, or too well understood. Jealous to protect their small amount of cultural capital, they will act snooty, and poo-poo others attempts to explore or understand art. Realism is a fine and valid form of artistic production. It has a long and distinguished history. Art is for you, and so you should do what you like with it, and not what others think you should. It's also kind of silly to say that realism is a form of art that lacks "interpretation". Actually, any type of reproduction involves "interpretation". Even a photograph is mired in it: when you think about the act of taking a picture, you focus on some aspect of reality and emphasize it by excluding your other surroundings- you frame the photograph, you put it in a book relevant to some interpretive or artistic project, or you hang it on a wall in a particular environment (be it a house, an office, a museum), and each of these surroundings carries with it its own boatload of context and meaning. The next time someone starts to squash on realism, you can point them to its broad and important history in the Western canon. You can explain that, actually, the entire Renaissance came about largely BECAUSE artists were interested in exploring accurate pictoral representation in the form of vanishing perspective and accurate modeling of the human body. Much of the rest of art-history has been simply a movement towards and away (and then towards, and then away again, etc.) from a realist-like perspective towards something "more abstract." (The idea that abstraction holds some core value superior to realism is an invention only of the 19th century bourgeois value-system. Art in the salon culture of 19th century Paris became increasingly a form of social capital, and owning it and knowing about served as indicators of wealth and position. During the shift in the 1860's from the realism, etc. of the salon culture into the impressionist and post-impressionist movements following it, the idea of art as "cultural capital" was maintained and even reinforced.) You can, as mentioned above, point out out that this is present in contemporary art as well, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close and the Hyper-realists. You can point to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Rosler, and her various social projects, based on the earlier photographic essays ofhttp://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2009/1934/ You can say "Hi, have you heard of Diego Rivera?", and you can even point out the fun fact that Jackson Pollock, king of Abstract Expressionism, was trained as a realist painter. If you're interested in studying these issues of Realism, and how much interpretation it actually involves, there is tons of literature you can read. I think a good starting point would be: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction", a short essay by Walter Benjamin, that is probably one of the most referenced essays in art history scholarship. "The Museum without Walls" by Andre Malraux, which is basically a book about how art (regardless of its realist/abstract qualities) is appropriated by institutions for their own ends., and http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/alpers/describing.html" by Susana Alpers, a GREAT book on realism and realist interpretation, specifically in the context of 17th Century Dutch painting.

...what a photograph can produce much more easily, which is simply visual fidelity to the subject... I don't know much about art, but this sounds to me like a painter's dismissal of photography: Only the boring kind of photography is primarily about visual fidelity. If a photograph can be a work of art, so can a realistic painting.

Many art teachers and artists trained in the western tradition over the past half-century have been heavily influenced by modernism. Western art owes a great deal to the development of art schools through the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus and through the avant-garde of the 20C, many of who were reacting to the horrors of WWI (eg Dada) and WWII (eg Abstract Expressionism). Key to understanding what people are saying to you is realizing that, generally speaking, the idea behind a work of art is considered to be as important, if not more important as the aesthetic qualities of a work. Thus Michel Duchamp’s http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm can be proclaimed the most important work of the previous century. Going back even further, the invention of photographic techniques in the 1800s made realism in painting and drawing less necessary. We can see the results in Impressionism, Fauvism and many of the art movements of the 20C. Even when influenced by photography (see the blur and point of view in http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/monet/paris/capucines.jpg by Monet for example ) paintings tried to push the boundaries of what photography could do. While some artists are interested in photorealism (see the amazing http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mr/assets/images/stamps/2007_marypratt_stamp.jpg) those who are most respected in the art world tend to create work that is somehow out of the ordinary, or interesting beyond the fact that it is a highly detailed copy. Pratt usually paints the contents of the kitchen (roasts, jelly, fish on tinfoil) –things that are mundane but become interesting because they are still so closely linked to the idea “woman’s work”. In contrast a painter like http://www.wildlifeart.org/ViewArtwork/index.php?tID=55 while immensely popular and obviously highly skilled tends to be less appreciated in high art circles because he paints wildlife and this is seen as repetitive and uninteresting. If you are interested in looking at someone who straddles the worlds of photorealism and abstraction, check out http://images.google.ca/images?q=gerhard+richter&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=_t1lS7yCK8_4lQeZ67iUCg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQsAQwAA.

First of all, if it makes you happy, keep doing what you're doing. You need no other reason or approval. A big part of art is the problem solving activity of taking some subject and rendering it in your work (even if your subject is abstract or conceptual). The technical challenge of realism is great and engrossing, but the end result of mastering that challenge is simply that you're getting close to what a photograph can produce much more easily, which is simply visual fidelity to the subject. This is what confounded artists in the late 19th and early 20th century, and led to tremendous exploration of what other challenges were available--cubism, expressivism, abstraction, conceptualism, minimalism, etc. Still, people like pictures that look like something, and people like making those pictures. In the rarified world of the "pure artist", realism really is grade school exercise; but that rarified world is a small, over-rated, elitist, capricious and generally inaccessible place that most artists stop worrying about. So there's nothing wrong with working in a realist mode, and many artists who make their living at it continue to do so happily. But... and it's a big but... they've generally moved beyond trying to get only an accurate representation of their subject, and are considering other things as well. They're experimenting with the effect of different mediums, of making different decisions in how they represent something, of simplifying the subject or highlighting particular aspects of it... this list is endless, but comes down to this: they're thinking about more than accurately depicting the subject. Keep making realist art, but be open to thinking about more than how much your work looks like the subject. Expose yourself to other artists and look for what they're thinking about. Keep a list of things that interest you in the work of others and try them out. Realism in art has actually made a strong comeback since the mid 20th century, but it's a realism that tries to do more than what a camera can do.

"However, be aware that the standard trope is that photography did make realistic painting less relevant. The upshot of this is that at most art schools today most students graduate without learning how to draw, no matter how legitimate their other pursuits. I think this is a shame." I am unaware of any art schools that do not require at least one intensive class in drawing from life (not photographs, by the way). Art school is a seriously misunderstood institution, if I'm to judge by most of the comments about art students that I see bandied about on metafilter all the time. Realism is still valid as a pursuit, one of the benefits of post modernity is that a diversity of techniques and approaches to image-making has become acceptable, if not encouraged. There's a plethora of well respected artists whose work is realistic, if not at least figurative. If anything, the tendencies in art today for quoting past movements and appropriating imagery from high and low sources often encourages contemporary artists to consider working from photographs while composing what they're attempting to communicate with their work. The lines between all disciplines (including the ones between photography and painting) have been blurred. That said, directly copying from a photograph and trying to match it as a goal is not the same thing as trying to capture reality- it's trying to reproduce a photographic image in paint. This is a dead end, and it's (relatively) easy to do with a little practice, the artist can gauge their improvement or the quality of their end result based on how closely their painting matches the photograph, and the result is certain to elicit positive responses from viewers who "don't know much about art but..." (as they often preface their judgements). This is why your art teacher expects you to progress forward from drawing directly from photographs to drawing from life or abstracting the parts of the source material you are using to create something more interesting. Learning to draw from life (which is not already two dimensional, unlike a photograph) is really about learning how to *look* in a new way. It's a skill separate from recreating something that already exists in a flattened form. Once artists learn new perceptual skills from studying the world around them, chances are they will bring those new insights back with them should they decide that their calling really is as a photorealist, and this broadening will allow them to investigate information provided by a photograph that they might otherwise have missed before.

http://ask.metafilter.com/144628/Art-for-arts-sake#2071711, here is Benjamin's famous http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm rather than a wikipedia link. The purpose of his essay is not to talk about "these issues of Realism, and how much interpretation it actually involves" but rather to discuss the ways in which mass dissemination of imagery affected the general public, and to what degree each of the disciplines at the time wielded the most power to control/direct the masses. Film held the highest position for Benjamin, since he theorized it diminished the distance between the work and the viewer in a way that reproductions of paintings could not- reproductions of paintings are still once removed from the actual object, whereas Benjamin saw film as a submissive/ immersive experience. He states: " for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art."

Well, straight-up copying photographs can only take you so far as an artist – have you drawn much that was directly from life? What everyone is saying about the place of realism in modern art is quite true (i.e. yes it does have a living place in modern art) but if you're presenting drawings of photos to someone with art training they are pretty much going to be able to tell they are drawings of photos and little more. But how do you get more? You experiment, you draw from life (if you're not doing that already), you find artists you really like and try to figure out what their thought processes are, and, well, I guess that's a start.