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The net has always seemed solid only to those who, with Plato, considered art to be the imitation of nature. The classic anecdote of the triumph of art as artifice concerned Zeuxis: when he unveiled his painting of grapes, birds flew down to peck at them. What the anecdotists seldom added is that Zeuxis' rival won the contest, for when the judges turned to unveil his painting, they were stunned to discover that the veil itself was the painting and declared him the winner because he had fooled the judges, while Zeuxis had fooled only birds.
Actually, mimesis as a theory of art was an illusion, invented by a beholder for other beholders. The artists themselves always knew that they were exaggerating, distorting, filtering—to express worship of the divine or a view of man, to make the real more real. But whether the emphasis was moralistic (said Tolstoi: "Art is the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings"), or emotional (Ruskin: "The first universal characteristic of art is tenderness"), or esthetic (Baudelaire: art is "the study of the beautiful"), or hedonistic (Santayana: "The value of art lies in making people happy"), the theory of art as imitation held on. It was finally destroyed in the 1880s—partly because of the appearance of the camera, which copied nature so much more accurately than could any human hand. Artists began to talk of a painting as "an object" in itself rather than the representation of something else.
"A painting—before being a war horse, a nude woman or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order," said one painter-polemicist, Maurice Denis, in 1890. Thus began the rapid but epic evolution in which representation was first blurred, then distorted, then broken into fragments and finally disappeared altogether in abstraction. The artists arrogated to themselves (as did the poets at the same time) the right to say what art was, with the added inference that if the viewer (or reader) did not understand it, that was his fault. "It was as if suddenly," says Painter Robert Motherwell, "an established church had dissolved. Each artist became his own self-ordained priest, charged with deciding for himself such questions as what is god or what is sin."
The New Church