Photorealist painting depicts photographs of reality, not reality itself

Evidence

There is here a striking parallel to the dynamics of so-called photorealism, which looked like a return to representation and figuration after the long hegemony of the aesthetics of abstraction until it became clear that their objects were not to be found in the “real world” either but were themselves photographs of that real world, this last now transformed into images, of which the “realism” of the photorealist painting is now the simulacrum. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 119

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘simulacrum’ through the concrete photorealism example of a copy of a copy.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in style as the economy’s way of appearing, and to the copy-of-copy logic central to understanding postmodernism. — connects to: Cubist collage made fragments of reality enter art as reality itself. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 238; Attempts to capture reality unmediated transform it into hyperreality instead — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 99