it’s funny how western art culture privileges naturalism. you see it in visual art too - people think african sculptors were/are “primitive” because they don’t sculpt anatomically-correct human figures, people laugh at medieval european paintings because the faces are so round and the eyes are so big and the cloth doesn’t drape right and why does baby jesus look like a tiny man. you’d think no one in any culture before 1600s italy had any idea what a human person looked like. but obviously they did; they were just making choices in the context of a different visual culture. you might as well make fun of cartoonists for making people’s heads and eyes so big and their mouths and bodies so tiny - but ofc we’ve got a blind spot to things in our own culture. same thing is true with acting, and singing. styles that were super popular in their day now seem overly schmalzy and affected to us, but that’s because, you know, we’re not capital-r Romantics, and we’re in a different artistic culture with different values
no artistic history is just an evolution of “artificial” to “naturalistic". maybe our current fixation on realism has to do with the advent and accessibility of photography, or western obsession with artistic techniques that are exceptionally difficult and time-consuming to cultivate (like pointe ballet or wagnerian opera singing, both of which also require a lot of time and money and other resources to learn how to do)
