![]() For realistic art renders an image of reality. ![]() The relation of art to its social outside cannot be dissociated from questions of representation. Realism thus opposes formalism, but it does not necessarily oppose abstraction. On the other hand, the realist project amounts to more than a positivist or automatic registration of something already given. This implies that those who commit themselves to the realist project, and hence to fidelity to reality, must be the contemporaries of this reality. Realism attests to reality it does not engender it. It is always already open to an ethical, political, and epistemic demand: realism – as a stance, a project, a production – requires fidelity fidelity, that is, to a reality that needs to be done justice in ethical, political, and epistemic terms. For unlike such formalism, realism is by definition impure. To isolate considerations of formal creation from art’s reference to that outside is to bid farewell to the project of realism. The debate on realism has always closely tied the notion of artistic progressiveness to the question of how artistic production relates to its social and cultural outside. ![]() That also means that there may be current artistic productions that fail to meet this double requirement, because they are anachronistic, regressive, or obsolete in one or both of the dimensions I have mentioned. These two criteria decide whether an art is worthy of its present, whether it can do justice to it. It is supposed to be an art of its time – with regard both to the state of artistic consciousness (in technical as well as critical terms) and to its relationship to the social and cultural reality in which it originates. For the normative sense of contemporary art is that it should make its historic present present to us. 2 Yet it strikes me as no coincidence that the general problem of the relationship between art and reality and the related issue of whether and how to accept the heritage of the realisms of the twentieth century become prominent at a time when contemporary art receives greater attention from institutions and critics. Instead, their arguments quickly veer toward very fundamental issues it is the ethics and politics of today’s art most generally that are at stake. ![]() 1 Participants in these debates are recognizably attracted by the concept of realism, but they also evince a certain hesitation to claim the label for their own practice or to actually use this highly fraught term to describe contemporary art in general. Primarily instigated by the 6 th Berlin Biennale in 2010, the German discussion over the possibilities of an aesthetic realism has come to new life arguments have been exchanged in academia as well as in the broader public sphere. ![]()
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