I had been waiting to see this movie forever and finally did right when it came out, and I can tell you it is awesome. It's a fantastic example of science and technology being used to solve a problem that just happens to be art. It's also a very compelling theory about the possible ways Vermeer did his more photorealistic paintings. Pretty much after this and spending the last year teaching myself to paint I can safely say if it looks like a photo, it's from a photo.

Another great book to check out is David Hockney's "Secret Knowledge", which covers how this is done in other ways, how projection devices were used by Kepler and others, how it could have been considered a guild secret among painters, and how when the photograph first came out people remarked how much the looked like "finished" paintings. His latest exhibit at the De Young was actually based on the research from this book where he cranked out a metric ton (quite literally) of art using various projection devices.

Another fun thing to do is "spot the laptop". You know how people are doing impressive hyperrealistic paintings like this:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/pictured-eloy-morale...

These are amazing, until you realize he's getting the fidelity he needs by making the paintings huge, then taking pictures of them from farther away. Can't tell a painting's size on the internet, so it looks super realistic until you see it in person. Next, if you look carefully at that first photo, he's looking off in the distance at....a laptop most likely, or a projection. If you look in youtube or at various artist's blogs you start to catch them with a laptop sitting right there, or an ipad stuck to their easel with the image right on it.

If you check out these hyperrealists (they don't say photo 'cause that's a bad word) you can sometimes catch them with a laptop, image on it squared off, sometimes even zoomed in.

What modern "Vermeers" are doing is they're using computers and screen technology to get very exacting details and color harmony using combinations of large size projections (you can see Eloy's pre-drawn lines), gridded images, and zooming on a computer screen. So the awesome thing about Tim's Vermeer is he shows that if someone's using enough technology to make art then they become just a mechanical photo printer. Might as well be a photographer.

Here's another artist you can see copying a photo:

http://www.littleobservationist.com/2013/05/22/artist-interv...

Françoise Nielly at least interprets them, but I bet if you looked she probably uses the hell out of computers at first to get studies right.

What's interesting is many artists use technology like this, and many of them get into this "cheating" when they run into disabilities or time constraints. The problem isn't the technology though, it's whether they pretend they don't use any, which is what a lot of these hyperrealists try to get away with. But, take an artist like Richard Schmid and you find he started using a computer after a major back injury and he freely admits he uses photos and computers to do painting.

What I liked about Tim's Vermeer is it's at least proof that someone with zero talent can use technology to create an equivalent to what's considered a masterpiece. David Hockney's book also demonstrates that much of the art we consider painted using pure skill is actually just clever uses of technology to do photo reproductions with oil paint.