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Photography replaced painting. I don't know about boring, but reality wins.

c22 5y ago
Painting is still a thing.
filoleg 5y ago
If anything, I would argue the opposite. Photography gave painting (and visual arts in general) a massive boost by the virtue of stripping the aspiration of going for "ultra-realism" in paintings. After all, that's what photography can accomplish much better and much easier. This made painters look for other directions to push their art into, which freed up artists' bandwidth for a lot of other, previously overlooked and not as popular genres, such as surrealism. Not saying that photography is responsible for creating those genres, they existed before. But (relatively) cheap and accessible photography definitely diverted attention from ultra-realistic paintings to other painting genres that enjoyed greater growth due to that. After all, what do you think will happen once it becomes very easy and cheap for anyone to have ultra-realistic 3D models and animation in videogames? It will become much less valued, as it is something that anyone can do very easily. So people doing 3D art will need to look in other directions to distinguish their work. I have already been observing it happen over the decades in gaming. For present day examples: Nintendo manages to nail the style of visuals in a lot of their first party titles without even attempting photo-realism. Guilty Gear -STRIVE- (made by ArcSystem Works) is killing it with their over-stylized visuals. Atlus and their Persona series keeps pushing more abstract and surreal depictions with each game, and they resonate well with the audience. And I've only listed AAA-tier examples. Once you dive into indies, you can go on forever with lots of well-executed products that pretty much intentionally went against photo-realism.
dylan604 5y ago
I think the plethora of filters and their popularity totally disagrees with this. Also, things like HDR processing to make things look eerily unnatural, desaturation f/x, etc are all ways of taking the reality into a new place.
creata 5y ago
What do you mean by this? I can't think of a part of my life where I use photographs, where someone in a different time would have used paintings.

c22 5y ago

Painting is still a thing.

If anything, I would argue the opposite. Photography gave painting (and visual arts in general) a massive boost by the virtue of stripping the aspiration of going for "ultra-realism" in paintings. After all, that's what photography can accomplish much better and much easier. This made painters look for other directions to push their art into, which freed up artists' bandwidth for a lot of other, previously overlooked and not as popular genres, such as surrealism. Not saying that photography is responsible for creating those genres, they existed before. But (relatively) cheap and accessible photography definitely diverted attention from ultra-realistic paintings to other painting genres that enjoyed greater growth due to that. After all, what do you think will happen once it becomes very easy and cheap for anyone to have ultra-realistic 3D models and animation in videogames? It will become much less valued, as it is something that anyone can do very easily. So people doing 3D art will need to look in other directions to distinguish their work. I have already been observing it happen over the decades in gaming. For present day examples: Nintendo manages to nail the style of visuals in a lot of their first party titles without even attempting photo-realism. Guilty Gear -STRIVE- (made by ArcSystem Works) is killing it with their over-stylized visuals. Atlus and their Persona series keeps pushing more abstract and surreal depictions with each game, and they resonate well with the audience. And I've only listed AAA-tier examples. Once you dive into indies, you can go on forever with lots of well-executed products that pretty much intentionally went against photo-realism.

dylan604 5y ago

I think the plethora of filters and their popularity totally disagrees with this. Also, things like HDR processing to make things look eerily unnatural, desaturation f/x, etc are all ways of taking the reality into a new place.

creata 5y ago

What do you mean by this? I can't think of a part of my life where I use photographs, where someone in a different time would have used paintings.