For my purposes, I'm focusing on human portraiture and figure study.

Consider the cave painters across the planet makin brown shapes and stick figures that we recognize as a human.

Then Egyptian artists, sculptors and painters who represented humans in smooth lines and contours. Then Greek sculptors that idealized the human body, but still took liberties with face.

The renaissance artists who dug in on realism and painted actual people you would recognize in person.

It's almost like an evolutionary chart of our ability to capture what it is we actually see by putting down the details ancestors may have ignored. But with the advent of photography, that objectivity seems to be pretty much standardized.

Will we ever be able to interpret what we see when we look at each other better than we do right now? Are there facets and details that we still ignore in our representation?

Great question/observation.

I think we've probably gotten to a point in art where it's kind of like fashion, cyclical (what's in/what's out at the moment).

I can't imagine that there is really much left to portray (physically), so I guess anything beyond that is what we add in concept.

I saw this dude named Frank Stella on Colbert Report and they introduced him by showin a portrait he'd done (I forget of whom) but it was a green background and purple squares inside each other. And my reaction was "Shut the fuck up!"

But however cynical my views on abstract art can be sometimes, maybe that's all art is for now. Through our technology, we got objective reality covered. Maybe piercing the veil will be the new realism?

Frank Stella has some great pieces. I haven't seen newer stuff, but things I've seen in museums of his I like. Whether I would consider any of it portriature or not...it's an eye of beholder kind of thing.

In response to your original question, it appears as though you are saying that accurate representation is what one should aspire to when creating art. That mindset leaves out a whole lot of art. Also, just because the Greeks and Renaissance artists added more details, it doesn't mean they were "right" (e.g. historically accurate) details. Finally, with the advent of digitial photography, even photography can no longer be counted on to be a "real" representation as it once could.

You might be interested in a book by Kirk Varnedoe, entitled "A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern" and, of course, I would recommend Walter Benjamin's seminal essay, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

Who knows?

There are 7 billion people on the planet who each see the world a little differently.

Who knows what one of us will come up with.

Another thought. Even a photograph is SUBJECTIVE reality, not objective reality, as you put it. The photographer CHOOSES what to include and exclude from the frame of photo. See something like Sarah Charlesworth's Modern History series:

http://www.sarahcharlesworth.net/series-view.php?album_id=34&subalbum_id=52

The editor choose the photographs, we can "read" the images, but they don't tell us the entire story, as Charlesworth points out through her removal of the text.

jone70 said:

Another thought. Even a photograph is SUBJECTIVE reality, not objective reality, as you put it. The photographer CHOOSES what to include and exclude from the frame of photo. See something like Sarah Charlesworth's Modern History series:

http://www.sarahcharlesworth.net/series-view.php?album_id=34&subalbum_id=52

The editor choose the photographs, we can "read" the images, but they don't tell us the entire story, as Charlesworth points out through her removal of the text.

Which is why pan-and-scan versions of films drive me crazy.