Plato's Critique on Realism in Art

One of the ambiguous and much discussed but still unknown aspects of the Western philosophy is two-thousand-and-odd-years critique of the Western philosophers on the Platonic philosophy of art. They believed that the Platonic Utopia is an anti-poetic no-man’s-land which has its root in the exile of artists from urbanity. This anti-Platonic position of the Western philosophy indicates the existence of a mysterious philosophy in the critical views of Plato about the truth of art within framework of city and citizenship. The present paper seeks to provide brief explanation of Plato’s critique on realism in art which aims to unveil the truth. This tendency has been turned into the main current in modern mass media after invention of such modern media as photography and cinema. Plato’s explanation of this artistic tendency can be taken as a key strategy in the area of applied art and a fundamental approach to configuration of media and artistic works. The main question of this research is whether the aesthetics theory of Plato can be simply decoded within framework of the Platonic system of realism or is, per se, capable of being presented as a paradigm? Is Plato’s “realism” based on a system of rational figures and his ethereal world, or on the opposite, the rational figures are based on the realism where “rational ideas” are taken as “figures of truth?” Why from Plato’s viewpoint, art is not an image of the Nature, but is the “dream of Nature” coming true? The Plato’s criticism of realism in art is the criticism of theorization on the “beauty of Nature” without taking a mystic approach to “nature of beauty.” It means to prevent “truth” from being victimized for the “real” and draw attention to pristine truth of the existence as opposed to reducing the artist’s perspective to lenses which just record the physical and material world.