The fleshiness of wax

This essay deals with hyperrealism and its materials from the perspective of aesthetics, meant both as the philosophy of perception and as the theory of art. It unfolds in four sections. First, I introduce the theoretical reasons lying behind the age-old banishment of hyperrealistic pictures from the realm of so-called “high” art. Adopting a phenomenological approach, I investigate why hyperrealism has been (and quite often still is) considered as a prior non-artistic. In the second part, I focus instead on Edgar Degas’s "Little dancer aged fourteen" (1878–1881) in order to show how hyperrealism (or, more precisely, a certain kind of hyperrealism) could and should be regarded as a fully legitimate form of art. Finally, in the third and fourth sections, I provide two paradigmatic examples of the use of hyperrealistic sculptures in contemporary art, so as to address the question of why they have been granted access to museums and art galleries all over the world, whereas ordinary wax figures à la Madame Tussaud’s – although materially indistinguishable from their much more appreciated counterparts – have not. The overarching goal of the essay is, therefore, twofold: to offer a historical-theoretical account of the equating, within the frame of traditional normative aesthetics, of hyperrealism with a merely passive, mechanical duplication of reality; and to provide a way to escape criticism of hyperrealism qua art form, by admitting the possibility of a seemingly paradoxical “original copy”.