[Live!: AHoA] Week 6 Discussion Prompt: Reality distortion

Assuming "reality distortion" in Art means "shaping the world into something different", I do believe it allows artists to create the impossible, to tell fantastic stories, to produce wonder in the viewers and to explore the understanding of life, the universe and everything.

Also, I believe every artist does that - to create illusions and to tell their story. With their styles and techniques, every artist filter reality, highlighting elements and erasing another. It could be as obvious as a mythical creature in the foreground or an exaggerated caricature, but it could be simply a color, brighter or slightly different from what it was in reality.


However, I do not believe the artists wanted the reality to really be like those distorted worlds created. For instance, I do not believe Bosch would like to live in that hellish world he created in The Garden of Earthly Delights - where even the heavenly part of it is bizarre and scary.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

By the way, you download from Wikipedia a very high resolution amplified version of this piece here - but careful: the file has 30,000 × 17,078 pixels and more than 220MB.

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Forum thread: https://class.coursera.org/livearthistory-001/forum/thread?thread_id=5716