It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection.
Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive this old art of Lying.
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist but to the public, blinding them to all, but harming the artist not at all.
The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.
The mark of all good art is not that the thing is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the tender, appealing vitality of the workman’s heart and head.
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality.
No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde Videos:
