against imitation
Plato rightly claims that people who imitate reality via arts and poetry are guilty of the 'most dangerious' of deceptions, since they are representing appearance as reality. Since this world is an appearance of a real thing, to imitate something from this world is a third remove from truth.
where does the drive for imitation come from? Aristotle thinks it comes from the natural desire to know. There is a proper and an improper drive to mimesis. The proper drive to mimesis integrates the comprehension of our nature in the mimetic form --i.e., that when we imitate, we are reproducing the thing as a human being sees it. This is what makes for beauty in arts, for when we draw a picture of someone we delight in seeing how a human being sees another. We learn about the thing as wel learn about ourselves, and the possibilities of our sensibility.
This proper mimesis is corrupted and broken by the imitation produced through mechanic means, like photography. Photogtaphy is no longer proper mimesis, because it integrates non-human forms of viewing. 
But there is a drive to imitate in order to supplant, or take the place of. This is the promethean mimesis, the idea that we can do it "better" than nature. We are not creating a human copy for the sake of the pleasure of seeing the thing through our way of seeing, but because what matters now about the thing is us. We might as well do away with the thing and just keep the copy. We might as well kill nature and do it ourselves, for all value of the natural derives from its relation to us. That is the promethean corruption of mimesis