Relation to the world· Aestheticsdifficulty
Nature of art
Does art imitate reality, or does it create something radically new?
Behind this choice lies the standard by which we measure a work: its faithfulness to the world, or its power to bring forth the unprecedented. The very status of the artist, skilful mirror or genuine origin, hangs on it.
Mimesis
4Art is essentially imitation: it represents nature, human actions, the world as it is or as it could be. Its value lies in the accuracy and depth of that representation.
Explore this position →Show implicit positions (4)
Platoexplicit
Art is mimēsis, imitation: painter and poet copy sensible things, which are themselves copies of the Forms, thus producing an image at the third remove, far from the truth. This definition of art as reproduction, not creation, grounds the critique of the poets and their banishment from the city.
Republic, X, 595a-602c · Sophist, 235d-236c
Platonismexplicit
For Platonism, art is mimēsis (imitation, a copy of a copy of the real): the painter copies the sensible object, itself a copy of the Form, so that the work stands at three removes from truth, twice removed from the real. This is why Plato distrusts the poets and submits them to censorship in the just city.
Plato, Republic, book X, 595a-602c, art as imitation · Plato, Republic, book III, 386a-398b
Aristotleexplicit
For Aristotle, the arts are modes of imitation (mimēsis): tragedy, epic and painting represent human beings in action. Imitation is natural to humankind and a source of pleasure and learning, which firmly anchors the conception of art as mimesis.
Poetics, 1-4 (1447a-1448b)
Aristotelianismexplicit
The conceives art as mimēsis, the imitation of human action: tragedy represents people in action. This imitation is no servile copy, for the poet portrays what might happen according to probability and necessity, yet it remains a representation of the real rather than creation ex nihilo, hence a position on the mimēsis side.
Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 1-4 and 9
Creation
1Art does not copy the world: it brings forth forms, visions, and worlds that did not exist before it. The artist's genius lies in the power of invention, not in faithfulness to reality.
Explore this position →Romanticismexplicit
Art ceases to imitate nature in order to create it: the work springs from , that original power which does not receive its rules from without but gives them to itself. Against classical and the canons inherited from the age of Enlightenment, Romanticism makes a creative faculty and the artist a kind of second creator. Originality becomes the supreme value, and the work the expression of a unique inwardness.
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria · Novalis, Fragments