hard · GRE Verbal

Passage: It is often said that photography killed realist painting by rendering mimetic skill obsolete. The claim has a certain neatness, but it inverts the actual sequence. Painters had begun to abandon strict verisimilitude for reasons internal to their art—an interest in the act of seeing rather than the thing seen—before the photographic image was cheap or common enough to compete. The camera did not push painting toward abstraction so much as license a direction it was already taking; it supplied, after the fact, a rationale that critics found more legible than the painters' own. The technology, in short, was less a cause than an alibi. The passage suggests that the phrase "less a cause than an alibi" is meant to indicate that photography:

1. Had no relationship of any kind to changes in painting
2. Was retrospectively credited with a shift that was already underway
3. Directly forced painters to adopt abstraction against their intentions
4. Was invented specifically to justify abstract painting
5. Prevented critics from understanding painters' true motives

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