There is no difference between realistic beauty and artistic beauty

The distinction between realistic beauty and artistic beauty comes from Plato’s division of the world. He believed that there are three worlds, the highest is the world of ideas, which is the real world itself. Next is the real world, which is the world of ideas imitated by craftsmen and the world created by human activities. The lowest is the world of art, a world in which painters imitate reality, an imitation of imitation. Therefore, art is lower than reality, and it cannot be higher than the real world. In addition, Plato also believed that the human soul also has three levels. The highest level is reason, located in the head, the second level is passion, located in the chest, and the third level is desire, located in the abdomen. Art is the expression and communication of emotions, governed by the passions of the second order. The real world should be rational (according to Plato's concept of the philosophical king ruling the world), so Plato's tripartite nature of the soul also proves that the beauty of art is lower than the beauty of reality. The idea that art is a form of imitation was passed down from Plato to Aristotle, who said that the nature of art is rooted in man's imitative nature.

The 19th-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy mainly understood art from the perspective of an artist. He believed that art is the indescribable emotional expression of the creator. The view that art is not an imitation or representation of the real world is accepted by the mainstream. In addition, reason is not supreme. On top of reason and logic, there is high-level sensibility, or "spirit". It is a collection of understanding, perception and imagination. Different from low-level sensibility, high-level sensibility is super-rational and super-logical and cannot be discussed using conceptual judgment reasoning, but it is universal. Einstein's theory of relativity broke the paradigm of classical physics. This revolutionary breakthrough and subversion cannot rely solely on reason to break itself from the inside of an object. It requires advanced sensibility to reshape physics. The result is that classical physics has become A special case of relativity. Therefore, Plato's tripartite theory is not valid, and artistic beauty is not necessarily inferior to realistic beauty.

So is artistic beauty higher than realistic beauty? Answering this question also requires looking at what art is, as mentioned above, art is the way in which human emotions are preserved. Collingwood wrote in "The Principles of Art", "A beast looks different when we are afraid than when we are not afraid. A person who we are in awe of seems to have a pair of large and Severe eyes. Therefore, an experienced painter really knows how to achieve verisimilitude, that is, he knows that he must produce emotionally correct verisimilitude through just the right amount of exaggeration.” Especially when daily language becomes boring and unable to express the deepest emotions, we need art even more. Art is not a dispensable decoration, not a tool for entertainment, not just a means to vent our psychological energy. If the world of human life and emotion is to be preserved and allowed to be seen again by future generations, it must be through artistic behavior and works of art. Art is a container for the preservation of human emotions and a channel for emotional expression. If knowledge needs to be preserved, correct social behavioral norms and ethics need to be preserved, then human beings' abundant emotions also need to be preserved, and art is such a container. Therefore, art is not only a superficial imitation of reality, but more importantly, it is the catharsis of human emotions and the expression of super-rationality.

In this sense, it seems that art is lower than reality. It is because we have real things that trigger abundant emotions in reality, and then we use art to preserve this emotion. This kind of preserved emotion is definitely not as full and fresh as the real world. Even if art preserves the real world 100%, it cannot guarantee that it can convey emotions to the recipient of the art 100%. In this case, how can we explain that art is higher than reality?

Tourists who travel always like to carry a camera with them to take pictures of the beautiful scenery they see. However, when they return home, they find that the photos in the camera are not meaningful and cannot express their psychological feelings when facing the beautiful scenery. . At this time, the beauty of art is lower than the beauty of reality. Even if the camera completely preserves the tourists' psychological feelings at that time, due to the lack of smell, touch and hearing, the artistic beauty of only visual experience is still lower than or close to the beauty of reality. But consider another situation. The Parthenon is a famous tourist attraction in Greece. Many tourists see the temple in the photos in the travel guide. It has a solemn and simple appearance and a mysterious temperament, which makes people yearn for it. However, when we arrived at the site, we discovered that it was just a stone temple on a hill. It didn’t look as shocking as when I first saw the photo. I felt a little disappointed. The hard climb up the hillside in the sun seemed like a waste of energy. In this case, artistic beauty is higher than realistic beauty.

The famous portrait photographer Pradhan has photographed famous politicians such as Obama and Putin, as well as celebrities such as Adele, as well as many ordinary people. When taking portraits, he always communicates with the subjects first, tries to learn something from the subjects, shows great interest in the subjects, and asks them to open their hearts. His purpose is not to take a good photo, but to discover a good story, follow his own moral standards, and deliver a shocking work of art. At this time, art is no longer an imitation of real images, but a new object that transcends real images and is endowed with emotion and soul. This kind of emotion and soul may come from reality, or it may just be the imagination of the creator. At this time, the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of reality.

When we talked about which is higher or lower between artistic beauty and realistic beauty, we forgot that both are phenomena or objects in the phenomenal world.

The phenomenal world is a world where people and things exist. It is not a complete thing or a complete person. It is the interaction between people and things in time and space. The beauty of this kind of subjectivism must start from the perspective of people, first talking about the elements of people, then the elements of things, and then saying that people are also part of things. In this way, there is no higher or lower degree between realistic beauty and artistic beauty. They both have human elements and have the characteristics of objects. Even if both of them try their best to break through the fact that they are objects, it will not help. They can never become objective and cannot Touch the world of what Plato called Ideas. In some cases, artistic beauty is higher than realistic beauty, but in other cases, realistic beauty is not as good as artistic beauty. This is why we need artistic processing. In many commercial advertisements, we can see how common it is to use artistic processing and packaging of products. What these advertisements sell is no longer a product, but an ideal world, a lifestyle, and a fantasy.

Everything that is beautiful brings pleasure to people, whether it is realistic beauty or artistic beauty. The amount of pleasure varies from person to person.