Art in decadence?

[Belacqua]

I'm inclined to think that, once photography hit it big, the sort of realistic detail prized in, say, the old Dutch masters, became obsolete. The objective became obsolete, and, for better or for worse, painting became about the subjective.

I think there's no doubt that photography has taken over some of the functions that drawing used to do. 

For example, tourists used to buy engravings showing the famous sites they had visited, whereas today they get picture postcards, or, more likely, take their own photos. Documentary evidence, or newspaper-type pictures done to convey information are better done with a camera.

It's important to note, though, that human beings don't see the way that a camera does. 

A camera only has one eye, whereas people have two, usually. The camera documents a split second of time, whereas people's perception lasts over some amount of time. Most importantly, a camera records every detail within the frame with equal clarity, and gives equal importance to every point. Human beings, famously, focus on what's interesting to them. They can completely ignore things that are right up front if there's something of more interest nearby. This automatic, unconscious editing makes our visual impressions different from a camera's. 

We don't know what the street looked like during the time Vermeer painted it, so we don't know how much he edited. Nearly all artists, even those ambitious of "realism," will fudge things. For example, if a tree and a pole are lined up so one is exactly behind the other, it's normal for an artist to shift his viewpoint just a bit to make their spatial relation clearer. It's very likely that Vermeer adjusted and edited quite a bit, because his goal was not documentary accuracy but a well-composed painting. 

We live in a mechanical age so somehow we have got the idea that what cameras see is "more real" than what humans see. But in fact it's very different. There is a sense in which a Picasso drawing is more accurate to human perception, because he will make the interesting bits bigger, the uninteresting bits smaller, and show different angles of a single object. A camera wouldn't be able to see the front and back of a woman at the same time, but a person could if he looks for a few minutes, and the model is rolling around, and Picasso is happy to show that. 

(The false idea that cameras show the truth while human perception doesn't is unfortunately emphasized in Chinese and Japanese, where the word for "photograph" is shashin 写真 -- literally "copy truth." Whoever made that up must have been in the business of selling cameras.)