Traditionally, for the longest time, the purpose of art This is, actually, the purpose of Western Art, for a portion of its history. A good deal of art attempts to convey what things are, which is much different from "what they look like." And the "what things look like" Grail is a bit of a merchant-class red herring, frankly, even in Western Art. Most artists try to convey "what they saw," which is vastly not "what was there." Ask Van Gogh. What we see is culturally/cognitively/subjectively conditioned. To see what I mean, try an exercise as simple as looking at pictures of white men in the art of Asia and Indian America. (Specifically, check out the Pacific Coast tribes' and Japan's interestingly convergent picture of gaijin.) Unless you subscribe to the archaic notion that non-Western Art is imperfect Western Art (those poor Chinese, if only they had discovered the vanishing point!), which is both racist and myopic, then you are left with a huge body of representational art that is not "realistic." People could identify which geisha a broadside depicted, so they saw what the painter saw in some sense. That is, it is not realistic in that it does not represent what I would have seen if I had looked at the geisha. The quest for realism is not an end, but a means. We try, in our art, to modulate distractions and focus attention. A foot that doesn't bend that way or a light that can't shine where it is shining (guess what program's lights I've been swearing at this morning!) draws attention to itself. If you don't want people to look at the foot, bending it wrong is a bad idea. If you don't want people to stare at the nostrils, you don't let the &#;&$%&* light come out of them. The end is getting people to look at what you want them to see, whether it is the color of light at Clichy, the ugliness under a glaze of beauty, the elegance of the curves in an olive, or the chaos of sudden death. Realism helps tell them where to look, but it isn't usually what we want them to see. Goya stopped using "realism" to get his effects, and painted his greatest works on the walls of his house. Realism is a craft that serves art. M