Make fucked-up art.

Even if it pays you nothing back.

THE FLATNESS OF HYPER-REALISM BY ALLISON RICHARDS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 110

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Value is a funny thing to measure art by. Talking about conceptual art as if it holds no “value” is wrong in several ways and correct in a couple more. Let me explain.

On social media an artist–very talented in a very specific, hyper-realistic style of painting–posts a time-lapse film of their work from start to finish. We, the viewers, are stunned by how true to life the figure in the painting looks, how the eyes look so wet or the cheeks look so soft. It’s just like a photo, we think as we watch, impressed by this artist’s ability to represent life exactly as it is.

We’ve been looking at perfectly drawn figures and swooning over them forever. But now the artist films the process and speeds it up to less than a minute, and shares it with millions of viewers on an app designed algorithmically to show us things we will react to.

The glorification of hyper-realism we’re seeing right now is fascinating to me, not because I am a fan of the kind of exact replication of form that seems to stun viewers, but because this shift to labor-intensive, exacting, time consuming, rigid art makes perfect sense in the context of our waveringly democratic reality.

Surprise! Fascists hate conceptual, abstract, and expressionist art. Endlessly striving for some fucked-up idea of perfection is a pillar of white supremacy, and a barrier to entry into a world outside the joyless one most of us inhabit in good old late-stage capitalism.

We viewers cannot paint perfect figures, so we don’t make art. We don’t have the time, so we don’t make art. We watch a video on TikTok and the end result looks more real than our goddamn reflection in the mirror, and so we don’t make art.

So some people think abstract artist Rothko is full of shit. Fine, that’s fine. We can have specific tastes in art without being fascist, obviously. But what isn’t fine is the flatness of hyper-realism and the way it exists in our attention right now.

When the art we make doesn’t contribute to its own commodification, it is seen as having no value economically. When what is most commonly commodified is hyper-realism, our less exact, less time-consuming, or more wildly imagined art is seen as less valuable. So, in this way, yeah. Conceptual art can be economically valueless.

When we cannot commit one hundred per cent of ourselves to our art because we have to go to work and we have to take care of our families, or we don’t want to make art that way, we aren’t going to become pros at hyper-realistic art. We aren’t going to be able to commodify what we make like TikTok virals or whatever.

As an artist who has made exactly zero dollars from my art, I’m okay with this. Thing is, my economically valueless art still has value. Not only is it a rebellious act to spend my time making something “valueless”, it is also a practice in fighting idealized perfection.

More than any of this commodification shit, it is important to recognize that artists have been making provocative, ugly, confusing, weird, seemingly unimpressive, or seemingly disturbed art in response to global hardship since the First World War. Surrealism, right?

So while hyper-realism is having its day, what’s brewing is (hopefully) something really fucking weird. Make fucked-up art. Even if it pays you nothing back.

ALLISON RICHARDS

I’m a 20-something writer and artist living in East Nashville. Before this I was in Boulder studying writing and literature at Naropa University–which explains why I have no money and too much time to write. I write essays and poetry about walking home, my struggle and ultimate recovery from anorexia, what it’s like moving through the world as a woman, chess, sucking dick, being afraid, being in love. girlseekingpeanutbutter.blog