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DiscourseFan 5 days ago

There is no “realism,” photography is its own form of art. What’s remarkable is how common this perspective is even today, such that it has been produced as “realistic” for you and how you see the world.

gilleain 5 days ago | parent [-]

I agree, however there is something to be said for the distance between the subject and the representation. If the 'underlying cow' is already somewhat square, then the representation in painting or photo is going to be close to that nebulous reality.

While it might be possible to take a photo of a cow that turns out looking spherical (due to the lighting or angle), it is surely going to be harder?

watwut 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The article points the contrast between how cows and how cattles are represented. "With ‘cattle’ you see lots of typical landscape scenes; lovely green meadows, maybe some water, and groups of nicely-painted cows grazing away." The cows paintings have different composition - a little to no background and a single standing large cow in focus.

Likewise, there is contrast between how highland cows are represented - from the front "the cows look like they’re posing for an album cover.". They do indeed look like a cow metal band could. They dont look rectangular, they look hairy.

DiscourseFan 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I guess there’s the platonist/pythagorean angle that circle, sqaure, and triangle are fundemental forms of seeing and artworks can only approximate them. But even then that is only for the forms of our perception and is not fundemental to the thing in itself, which has neither a name nor a definite shape, but is also in some sense shaped by forces of perception (in a material sense). But then I would argue that technology itself opens up not only new ways of seeing but also new formal possibilities and claiming that there is something fundemental to the forms of seeing to form in general limits those possibilities.