Mimesis

In plain terms

The obvious answer to what a painting is doing is that it is a picture of something. Art imitates the world.

Plato took that answer seriously and drew an unwelcome conclusion. A bed made by a carpenter is already a copy of the form of a bed; a painting of that bed is a copy of a copy, at a third remove from what is real. Worse, it can persuade people who know nothing about beds - so the painter competes with the expert while knowing less.

Aristotle accepted the description and rejected the verdict. Imitation is how humans learn, and we take pleasure in recognising. And what tragedy imitates is not a particular event but the kind of thing that could happen - which is why he says poetry is more philosophical than history.

As a philosopher would put it

Plato's argument in Republic X uses the three-beds analogy to place the artist at a third remove from the form, and adds a psychological charge: mimetic poetry nourishes the appetitive part of the soul at the expense of reason, which is why the ideal city restricts it.

Aristotle's Poetics keeps mimēsis and inverts the assessment. Imitation is natural to humans and is how they first learn; the pleasure taken in representations is a cognitive pleasure of recognition. And poetry represents the universal - what a certain kind of person would probably or necessarily do - which makes it more philosophical than history's record of particulars.

The Indian tradition offers a genuine alternative rather than a variant. Rasa theory makes the aim of art the production of a savoured emotional state in a prepared audience, so the criterion is what the work does to a spectator rather than how closely it copies anything - which sidesteps the whole imitation debate at its root.

What is actually disputed

Whether representation is what art is for.

The mimetic account explains a great deal of what art has actually done for most of recorded history, and it collapses as a definition the moment art stops representing. Music has always been awkward for it, and abstraction, conceptual work and much modernism are simply outside it.

Expression theories replace imitation with the articulation of feeling; formalist accounts replace it with significant form; institutional accounts replace the search for an intrinsic feature altogether.

The deeper question is what mimesis was ever meant to claim. If it means copying appearances, it was always false of tragedy, which imitates actions rather than surfaces. If it means representing possibilities of human life, it survives abstraction and is broad enough to be nearly unfalsifiable - and Auerbach's use of the term for the representation of reality in Western literature stretches it that far deliberately.