I guess this could have just been a shower thought as well…
Modern people lack an appreciation for the beauty of existence and the physical world. The most intricate and aesthetically pleasing creative achievements of the human race pale in comparison to the inherent beauty of nature.
Artistic expression is inherent to being human. Our creative achievements are part of the beauty of nature. A painting that can make you smile, a story that can make you laugh, a song that can make you cry, that’s all nature, and it is beautiful. If you haven’t found something that speaks to you yet, I hope you’ll keep looking
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate art more than most. But there’s an exclusionary aspect that exists with art, wherein only some people can truly appreciate various aspects.
In contrast, nature is more universal and primal. Everyone, regardless of language or culture or education, can appreciate natural phenomena. The beauty of nature speaks to us on a fundamental level, whereas the beauty of art requires a certain degree of acculturation and intellectual effort to grasp.
Furthermore, human art is a reflection of nature and indeed a part of the beauty of nature, as you say. However, that inevitably positions it as a subset of the all encompassing beauty of existence as a whole. Artistic works are small mirrors reflecting back aspects of reality in interesting ways. But because they can only ever represent fragments of the greater whole, they are somewhat less awe inspiring.
Often, works of art can prompt us to engage with the beauty of reality, so I’m not condemning them in any way. I’m just saying that the representation can’t be better than the real thing, even if humans wish that it were.
But it’s hard to argue that they could exceed the beauty of the thing that they reflect.
Only if you’re looking for objective value of paint on a canvas, or words on a page. What I think is beautiful about art is the way it makes people feel, and the complexity of the human context that allows that. Just this week, a story caused my fiancée to have a breakthrough in her CPTSD therapy. That’s a unique kind of beauty
Indeed, I agree with you on that.
Nah, thanks to piracy everyone can watch TV and movies for free. If you’re a poor person who grew up in the city nature is a lot less accessible.
Nah, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is better than nature.
It might partly be that a lot of what is designed for a screen is made deliberately to be maximally appealing to begin with.
For example a film or tv show is shot with various lense that create pleasing depth of field, color and light is carefully controlled. Same with high fidelity video games. Even the UI of your applications is made to be appealing and clean.
Sports are sort of shot like films too, and often the cameras can resolve much higher detail than our eyes alone can. The way a sports event is shot in high def can be like gaining the visual abilites of a hawk or something. The lens can zoom in close while our eyes can only squint.
Color saturation
Comparison mostly. HD and 3D isn’t impressing you by virtue of it being superior to real life (it isn’t after all), it’s impressing you compared to other examples of the same thing done “worse”. The best portrait artist in the world can not make something look more “real” than the reference material, but it can compared to other attempts at painting.
This is true in other natural things as well. For example, a really big tree surrounded by smaller similar sized trees feels “really impressive” compared to a mountain surrounded by other… similar sized mountains. Or why a particularly colorful plant seems impressive surrounded by a bunch of green and brown plants.
On the other hand, things like OLED screens can be impressive compared to the natural world due to their ability to arrange and display colors rarely found in nature.
Lighting
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It’s a technological feat and you love to be part of this progress. Remember when graphics were shit, wheels were square and textures were a washed out blob of color, but we were impressed because we knew this was another breakthrough. Now we still find ways to improve graphics even though last week we thought this was as realistic as it gets. When you play games, you also look at it from the perspective of how advanced it is.
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These days we get to see perfect worlds on screen. Developers make sure that every corner has something to look at, colors pop, everything is neatly arranged, the light perfectly fits the mood. Maybe it rains in-game but you don’t have the annoying real-life effect of getting soaked, so you can simply enjoy how it looks and sounds. You know sometimes in the real world you think, wow this view looks really amazing and you pull out your phone to capture it? In modern games that happens more often and in the right moments. It’s all orchestrated.
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Well, if ye think about it from a perspective of recording things
Most of our ancestors may have been able to look at things as it is, according to their eyes, but they’ve never seen it recorded in photos and videos, let alone in color or good quality, until these relatively recent centuries that we now live in…
It gives a new perspective to the world around us, beyond our eyes, and is probably the closest we’d ever get from literally looking at someone else’s point of view…
Is it?
We see the world around us every day
I guess we just didn’t expect to see this kind of realism from a TV screen until it came out, it was a totally new arguably ground-braking thing. Especially with fictional media, which is why James Cameron’s Avatar was so great in 3D (despite being utterly boring IMO).
Think about it, the first HD television broadcasts started in the early 90s in Japan. How exciting that must’ve been. They even got HD movies in the form of Hi-Vision Laserdiscs.
Removed by mod
Habituation. We get used to seeing the same things all the time. When you do novelty or high adrenaline experiences your perception changes. Try jumping with a parachute out of a plane, or a high altitude zip lining, driving a race car around a track, etc. Aftewards you experience a sense of heightened perception and appreciation.
I feel like it’s the perspective that matters? Yes, we go through life seeing “higher resolution” in real life, but recreating this through pixels on a screen is a different medium. Going even further, if we take the next step and look at VR, suddenly we have real life competing with something that was previously unable to be experienced (more than once, at least.). Like, you can get a lightweight experience of what it’s like to fall off of a tall building. We can do it in real life. We can do it in a 2D/3D game. And we can do it in VR. The “real” feelings we get of this happening in reality aren’t quite the same as they are in VR, although it comes close, and likewise aren’t the same in monitor gaming, but again can come close. Our brains are interesting that way. My stomach is able to drop when falling from tall heights in games, despite in real life not actually being falling, or even moving in the slightest.
So I think it comes down to it being the medium and what it’s presented with.
