Realism

No work of representational art is really the same as the thing it represents. Which does not mean that realism – understood as the closest possible adherence to what the real is like – cannot or indeed has not attempted to create works of art that represent reality truthfully. The way it really is.

But is it not questionable whether a work that is really like the thing it represents would still be a work of art? Such a work would be like a 1:1 map, but a 1:1 map is no map but simply the landscape mapped. (As in the story by Borges.) Thus if realistic art would aim at representing reality the way it really is, such an art would be striving towards abolishing itself as art.

On the other hand; would not a really and truly realist perception of art, rather than strive to represent reality, seek to show that art as such is not real? Realist art would then be aimed at its own departures from the real.