Salvador Dalí was mainly a Surrealist painter (part of the Dada movement of Europe in the early to mid 20th century).  But in his later years, he reached an amazing level of photorealism in some of his paintings.  The thing is that he never really went 'photorealistic' and stuck to surrealistic themes (there is one painting that could be considered more photorealistic than surrealistic).

Later, during the 1960's iirc, there was a movement for photorealistic painting.  For the most part, I don't get it.  If you can take a photograph, why paint it?  The only reason might be the challenge as there assuredly is no other explanation.  Yet, they are still among us - mainly airbrush artists or those who work with Photoshop producing photorealistic images.

I guess it all depends on your point of view.  Before photography, especially color photography, the drive for realism in art had merit.  This is because there was no other visual way to record real observations except through artistic representations.  With the invention of photography, this was no longer practically necessary.  If an artist of the early Renaissance had a camera (and there are speculations to the camera obscura but this was a very primitive light capturing device), why paint a magnificent battle scene that took months or years when you could capture the real scene by other means?

On the other hand, it could be an excellent fantasical, historical, or futuristic visualization tool to be able to create photorealistic images of things that cannot be capture by camera.  Let's face it, time marches on and a missed moment cannot be recaptured (time machines are basically wishful thinking used as devices for science fiction).  So, being able to present a 'photorealistic' image or movie of an event such as this would lend credibility or a sense of connection.

My problem with the effort involved here is that this shows amazing skill for a challenging process, but does not replace anything.  Such an image could have been much more easily produced by a camera.  And the implications here are both positive and negative.  Great work and talent show dedication and masterful skill using a tool or a group of tools.  But these processes could also be used to create convincing falsehoods (forgeries, doctored images, and so on).  Some of the best painting forgers are considered masters, criminals, but masters since the skill required to mimic, say, DaVinci or Rafael, is something that cannot be faked easily - it requires just as much skill and knowledge as was used by the original master.

I guess that some people consider 'art' to be the adeptness of their skills more than the emotional/philosophical/political/reasonable reasons for the process.  In other words, it is not the feeling, aesthetic, or thought-provocation that counts, but the technical execution.  This has always been with us, one supposes.  Sometimes one achieves greatness more by skill than by mastery towards an end, if you know what I mean.

Robert

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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