Stacks 39701

「Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life」


Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful
things are corrupt without being charming.
This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings
in beautiful things are the cultivated.
For these there is hope.

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All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.


"Rational? There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest. One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally."


"Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art.

You smile. Consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence.

At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them."

— Oscar Wilde