By “Realism” I mean in art, and not as in the “There is no such thing as Reality.”
That distinction made, I mean to lay out some of the further meanings that hold in common a lack of existence but have yet all happily called themselves “Realists” and their work, “Realism.”
(I am using archaic capitalization rules by design. This parenthetical, as all, may be ignored and cut.)
Let us take the French painter, Courbet, who ca 1850 showed laborers and dirty boots… I should mention I admire Gustave’s life and work, and I admire him as a great man, loyal, true, good, and tough, his work is not “Realism.”
In the first place, obviously, his paintings are never realistically lit as one might find the scenes in nature. The technique is a method of knocking out landscapes in the studio fast, and their very drama depended on their — to my eyes — eerie unreality could not be called “realism.”
At the same time as Courbet’s brave stand in a hostile world, photography was demonstrating that real “Realism” might be possible. There even existed at that time and for some time the expression, “Photographs never lie.”
Can you imagine anyone saying that now?
(And, by the way, I am not laboring much to “prove” my assertions; rather, I am quickly jotting down axioms and derivatives.)
And we see this exaggerated to a grotesque mockery in “AI ‘art.'”
Indeed, do we even trust our own senses to correctly report the universe?
Honestly, I think we are all teleptaths, and we accurately all report what we perceive without deception, and that collective report is approximately what we could rightfully call reality, and even though that is pretty close, one suspects there is either bit more or less, so you never quite can take in the whole of reality.
Now, I fork.
Fork One: You Can Try
Fork Two: A good example.
Let’s go to Fork Two first.
Time and Sight!
The further away an object is from you, the longer it has taken for perceptual waves or particles from it to you to arrive. Therefore, the further away, the further removed in time. You are not seeing the far object as it IS, you are seeing the far object as it was when the light from it to you was beginning to travel in your direction.
Nearer objects are nearer in time, of course, but look at the impossible mathematics in calculating all those times it took for all your sight lines to arrive, and that is sight alone! No matter how many senses we have, and surely it is many times more than five or six, we have that time bent factor. This makes reality simply too complicated to ever quite duplicate by time and sight alone themselves.
(And though I say I do not bother with proofs much, sometimes I do bother when I see one that is simple and clear.)