Michael Mitchell: Archive

I call art the faking of reality because I think both viewers and artists today need to rediscover what art really is. It's a slight exaggeration, but I mean it.

An artwork, a work of art, is a representation of reality, it is not reality itself. Though realism is important, "realistic" does not mean "real." Art should not be a copy of reality, it should be a stylization of reality. The artist's job is not to plagiarize reality, but to recreate an idealized version of it. Otherwise, what's the point?

I confess. I want the happy ending. I want to see the good guys win every time. I want all of the actors to be beautiful. I want to see fantastical worlds. Of course, I know the good guys fail sometimes and most people are not beautiful and the world we live in is usually very dull and boring, but why should an artist recreate that and why should I spend time viewing it?

I plan to write a lot more about this in the future. I want to change the way we think about art and to hopefully change the way art is created and to thereby transform the pedestrian and generic art we see every day into the grandiose and uplifting art we should all demand.