Is realism dead?

Actually, the question is based on an article in Newsweek titled, "Is Photography Dead?"

Yet wandering the galleries of these two shows, you can't help but wonder if the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition. Sculpture did the same thing a while back, so that now "sculpture" can indicate a hole in the ground as readily as a bronze statue. Digitalization has made much of art photography's vast variety possible. But it's also a major reason that, 25 years after the technology exploded what photography could do and be, the medium seems to have lost its soul. Film photography's artistic cachet was always that no matter how much darkroom fiddling someone added to a photograph, the picture was, at its core, a record of something real that occurred in front of the camera. A digital photograph, on the other hand, can be a Photoshop fairy tale, containing only a tiny trace of a small fragment of reality. By now, we've witnessed all the magical morphing and seen all the clever tricks that have turned so many photographers—formerly bearers of truth—into conjurers of fiction. It's hard to say "gee whiz" anymore.

Of course photography the medium is still around, and prominent; what the article is pointing out is that it's lost it's realism. Is realism dead?

If so, it's been dying for a long time. Art as representational or imitative is the simplest and oldest view of what art is all about. Plato talked about this view of art in The Republic, using the example of a bed. A painting of a bed is a copy of a concrete bed (which is itself a copy of the ideal Form of a bed). Both Plato and Aristotle referred to the representation of nature through art as mimesis. Though later art became increasingly less and less "real," it was still meant to be representative of something real, just less concrete (instead of a concrete bed, an abstract thought or emotion for example). The Form is what's become increasingly removed from something more concretely familiar. A realistic Da Vinci eventually becomes an abstract Rothko.

Photography is broadly used here, meant to include other realism mediums as well, like film and video in which the outside world is exactly reproduced before any manipulation occurs. Photography as an artisitic medium, one in which concrete realism is a given (point and shoot), was perhaps the last hold out in which an imitative depiction of familiar reality mattered. What's left is still real; it's just not your present obvious real.

Unfortunately technology hasn't gotten around to offering new "real" representative mediums (where's my holodeck already?), so maybe realism is dead. In the least, it's definitely comatose for the time being, awaiting technology to catch up and provide us something new to manipulate.