Where does mimesis collide?

The idea that a work of art is an imitation or representation of reality, and that imitation is what art fundamentally does. Plato's Republic (ca. 380 BCE) treated poetry and painting as imitations of the visible world, and therefore as copies twice removed from truth, while Aristotle's Poetics (ca. 335 BCE) recast the same imitation as the source of art's value, arguing that people learn and take pleasure from well-made likenesses of action and character. Halliwell's 2002 The Aesthetics of Mimesis traced how this one Greek word has carried a whole family of theories about how art relates to the world. The referent here is a relation between an artwork and what it depicts, not a survival trick in an insect nor a bodily capacity to copy studied by anthropologists.[1][2][3]

Unit

One depicting relation between an artwork and what it represents

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by critical and philosophical analysis of how closely and in what manner a work represents its subject

The bodily human capacity to imitate, to produce and read likenesses, and through copying to take on the qualities of what is copied. Benjamin's 1933 essay On the Mimetic Faculty named this capacity and argued it once underpinned magic and later flowed into language and writing. Taussig's 1993 Mimesis and Alterity carried the idea into anthropology, using it to study how colonial encounters, masks, and copied objects let people grasp and gain power over others. The referent is a faculty belonging to people and their bodies, a way of knowing by imitating, not a property of an artwork nor a colour pattern that hides an animal.[4][5]

Unit

One instance of a person copying and taking on the qualities of another

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied ethnographically through practices of copying, masking, image-making, and imitation in a culture

The condition in which an organism resembles part of the inanimate surroundings, such as a leaf, twig, stone, or bird dropping, so that a predator or prey mistakes it for that object rather than for food. Wickler's 1968 Mimicry in Plants and Animals grouped these resemblances to lifeless models alongside other forms of deceptive likeness in nature, and Pasteur's 1982 classification of mimicry systems formally named this case mimesis, marking it off from mimicry proper by the model being an inanimate thing rather than another living organism. The referent is an evolved deceptive appearance in a plant or animal, favoured because it lowers the chance of being noticed, and it has nothing to do with art copying the world or a person copying another.[6][7]

Unit

One species or form whose appearance imitates an inanimate object

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Tested by field and laboratory trials of how often observers detect or attack the mimic versus a control