The Flatness of Hyper-Realism, and the Juicy Ass of Conceptual Art

I’m moving, dear reader, and I’m about to be incredibly broke. I’ve been thinking about how the hell I’m going to make money when what I really want is to be a weird artist, and I started thinking about the value of art. 

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

There’s this phenomenon happening on the social internet, as there always seems to be, where an artist, very talented in a very specific, hyper-realistic style of figure drawing or painting, posts a timelapse of their work from start to finish. We, the viewer, are stunned by how true to life the figure looks–how the eyes look wet or the cheeks look soft. It’s just like a photo, we say, and we watch, impressed by this single human’s ability to replicate life exactly as it is. 

This is not a new phenomenon–we’ve been looking at perfectly drawn figures and swooning forever. But it’s…interesting.. to me that now we can film the entire process, speed it up so it lasts less than a minute, and share it with millions of people on an app algorithmically designed to show you things you 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 people, but because this shift to labor-intensive, exacting, time consuming, rigid art making makes perfect sense in the context of our current, waveringly democratic reality.   

Surprise! Fascists hate conceptual, abstract, and expressionist art. 

The link between the hatred of modern, expressionist art and fascism is one explored much further by much more qualified people. My favorite of these explorations is on youtube—it’s by Jacob Geller, called “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art.” He explains in the video that hating modern, expressionist art doesn’t make you a fascist (so don’t hate me if it’s not your thing) but the rigid adherence to aesthetic perfection is an idea propagated by these fuckers. 

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 cannot make perfect, exacting figures, so we don’t make art. We don’t have the time to paint a visibly soft, perfectly real cheek, so we don’t make art. We watch a process video on tiktok and the end result looks more real than our goddamn reflection, and so we don’t make art. 

People hate Rothko. Still, after all this time and all the papers studying people’s psychological responses to the colors he uses–people still think he’s full of shit. Fine, that’s fine. People can have specific tastes in art without it being fascist, obviously. 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 percent 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 hyperrealistic drawing–we aren’t going to be able to commodify what we make like the tiktok, virals or whoever. 

As an artist who has made exactly zero dollars from my art, I’m okay with this. Thing is, my absolutely 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 the kind of idealized perfection I was talking about earlier. 

More than any of this commodification shit, it is important to recognize that we’ve 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 gives you nothing back.

More on this to come.

I love you. 

A