From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Simulacrum (plural: -crums, -cra), from the
Latin simulare, "to make like, to put on an appearance of", is first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation of another thing, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god; by the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original.
Philosopher Frederic Jameson offers
photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, where a
painting is created by copying a
photograph that is itself a copy of the real.
Other art forms that play with simulacra include Trompe l'oeil, Pop Art, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave.
