Yeah, for them fake means that it's not being artificially inflated by blood and perverse business practices.

It's such bullshit, from the social usage as a token of value for females to the fake perception of value.

I hope they fall hard.

In that respect it's the same as any other collectible or antique that can be reliably replicated in slightly better condition and with slightly less irregularity than the highly prized "mint condition" originals made by the most skilled artisans...

(Less so for industrial uses, or for inserts into the average person's engagement rings where it's the thought and style rather than the provenance that counts)

Photorealism was the ultimate goal of artists, until that became easy.

Well, there was really a bifurcation in art.

Painting and drawing went for various forms of stylized representation, because competing against photographs doesn't interest most people.

But you also had a new field of photography, where the focus is now composition. There is a marked difference between the photographs I take and the photographs a skilled photographer takes, even if both are realistic depictions of a scene, and the difference is, sometimes, art.

All discussion aside, I see portrait photography as painting with people.

That is, it's not so much about composition, as it is about using objects around you - people, nature, etc - to paint a picture instead of using paint and brushes.

It's much easier than painting when the picture you see in your head is much like what the camera lens sees when you point it in a given direction.

However, often there's work required to paint the picture you see in your head. With people, it's figuring out what to say to them to make them look the way you see them - to bring out the inner warmth - and to figure out how to capture in a static image what the eye sees over a stretch of time.

Ultimately, with movies we've come full circle: filmmakers often resort to painting (i.e. CGI) instead of photography, because sometimes it's easier just to paint the picture one has in their minds with a graphics tablet than it is to paint it with real-world objects positioned around the camera - even if realism is the goal.

I would rephrase this as that the market demand for photorealistic portraiture decreased due to the rise of photography.

The artistic merits and goals are another axis altogether from market demand, and a bit more difficult subject.

That's true but I think part of it is also that once we achieved photorealism, we began to realize that photorealism isn't everything.

I think Bouguereau managed to surpass photorealism. It's more real than real, but, from what I read, the techniques he used are forever lost.

http://webneel.com/william-adolphe-bouguereau-paintings

Yup, when I doing some research for an engagement ring I read "reviews" on Moisanite arguing that it wasn't as nice as a real diamond because it had "too much sparkle." So I got the Moisanite and my fiance loved and gets compliments on it all the damn time!

I'd expect a significant change in diamond pricing structure — De Beers and the jewelry industry sure can keep prices from dropping uncontrollably, but I'd guess some kinds of impurities will become markers of superior value ("true natural 10..100× more expensive") due to difficulty of artificial reproduction.

I can see the desire for obviously occluded diamonds to become chic, since their manufacturing value would be low enough that fakes likely wouldn't exist, but I don't see how impurities would be "difficult to reproduce".