Art as imitation, expression or creation

The big idea: Look at a portrait. Is it copying a face? Pouring out the painter's feeling? Or making something that never existed before?

Those are three whole theories of what art is for — imitation, expression, and creation — and each has a champion.

Keep this trio as your map for the micro: art as imitation, art as expression, and art as creation.

Start with the oldest and most suspicious answer.

Plato: art is a copy of a copy: Plato said art is imitation (mimesis): a painting of a bed copies a real bed, which itself only copies the perfect 'idea' of a bed. So art is a copy of a copy — two steps from truth. Worse, he thought, it stirs the emotions and can make lies look beautiful. That's why Plato was suspicious of art: it imitates reality without understanding it, and can mislead us.

Checkpoint — Plato: In one line: art imitates reality, so for Plato it's a copy of a copy — suspect, and possibly misleading. Hold that — the next view flips imitation into something far warmer.

Centuries later a movement turned the whole question inward.

The Romantic view: art EXPRESSES the artist: The Romantic view says art isn't about copying the outside world at all — it's about expressing what the artist feels inside. Leo Tolstoy put it sharply: art is the transmission of feeling — the artist feels something, puts it into a form (paint, music, words), and the audience catches that same feeling. Good art, for Tolstoy, is art that successfully passes a real feeling from one heart to many.

Go further — higher-level insight: Spot the third option hiding between the two. If art isn't copying the world (Plato) and isn't only pouring out private feeling (Romantics), maybe it's creation — bringing something genuinely new into being, a form that didn't exist before. A great symphony copies nothing and isn't just the composer's diary; it's a new thing in the world. Naming creation as a rival to both imitation and expression is a top-band move.

Checkpoint — expression and creation: In one line: art may copy the world (imitation), pour out feeling (expression), or make something new (creation) — and most great art does more than one.