Response to Oscar Wilde

So, here comes the big question that has been long debated: What is a critic? What does a critic do? The simplest and the most straightforward answer would be a person who offers reasoned judgment or analysis, interpretation, or observation. But is he also an artist? What is criticism outside creation?

Oscar Wilde, an Irish writer with languishing attitude who often appears in cartoons wearing a ‘too-too’ skirt, takes a serious stab at what it means to be a critic in the Critic as Artist. Known for his involvement in aesthetic movement, Wilde argued that the art should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or philosophical messages. According to him, the art, since it has no didactic purpose, needs only to be beautiful. In the self-righteous voice of Gilbert, Wilde, insists that art is always the result of the most self-conscious effort.

It seems fair to say that great artists worked unconsciously and that they were wiser than they knew as Emerson once said. Then are we, as critics, all looking for something that is not there? Trying to find – or give - meanings in nothing? Gilbert says that the age that has no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all. If that statement were to be true, how about people taking a pre-historical artifact and consider it to be a beautiful piece of art? It seems paradoxical: by lending to other ages – such as pre historical era when there was no form of criticism, thus no art – what we think we desire for our own – beauty – we are ‘creating’ art. If art means being beautiful, and if one can find meaning in something, just about anything and everything can be called art. So is it really that the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not?

If Wilde [in the voice of Gilbert] is right, how can criticism be an art? Didn’t he say that art has no purpose or meaning other than being beautiful? Having some sort of a profound meaning as it possesses no meaning at all… He starts to sound more like a philosopher than anything. Perhaps it is more correct to say that the criticism completes art, or that the criticism gives meaning to art.

Gilbert tells Ernest that criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does. To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. Ten minutes must be perfectly sufficient to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing, if one has the instinct form. Going with Wilde’s wine metaphor, then, a well-educated sommelier always right? Some research shows that all these sommeliers failed blind testing. Many reviews on wine are inflated. Our senses are all messed up by its label. This reminded me of a story from Afterglow where critics across the nation gave a movie raving reviews because they thought Pauline Kael did so, when in fact she hadn’t even seen the movie. Conscious aim at art is a delusion in a sense. A critic will be always showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age.

But is such work as Gilbert has talked about really criticism? It criticizes not merely the individual work of art, but Beauty in self. Why should people care? (Gilbert, at one point, asks Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? But really, why do we care what anyone says if art only has personal meanings?)

When Gilbert’s long lecture on what it means to be a critic was finally over, a quote from the movie Thank You for Smoking came to my mind: “if you argue right, you are always right.” As Springfield Republican once commented on Wilde’s behavior, his conduct seems more of a bid for notoriety or a controversy than a devotion to beauty and the aesthetic.

As he began to be involved in the aesthetic movement, Oscar Wilde began wearing his hair long and began decorating his rooms with peacock feathers, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objets d'art. It makes me wonder what self-conscious effort Wilde had to make to justify the beauty in a peacock feather. At least, to my uncultivated eyes, a peacock feather is just a colorful bird feather.