Question

Quest for Wisdom

Please write a one page double spaced response to Oscar Wilde’s insight that it is “through art and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” Art according to Wilde protects us from the Real, from the actual, by transporting us into the virtual. Art provides us with a world of antiseptic safety. Art for Wilde is preferable to life because, “We weep but are not wounded. We grieve but our grief is not bitter.” Art for Wilde transforms the real into the virtual. Is it not the other way around, namely that art must force us to confront the real. Can Art can heal us when it forces us to confront our fictions?

Answer 1

Oscar Wilde was a novelist, playwright, and poet. He looked at art as a piece of the artist’s creation that can teach us many things.

One has to view the art through imaginative eyes because the artist's imagination and thoughts a presented through his work, if the art of work can affect a person's souls then it is the work that has sent the message. It is only the person who can imagine and value art.
Art is not a written manuscript it is an image that has to be decoded by the viewer looking through the artist's eyes.

A true and successful artist is one who can send his message successfully, and a true viewer is one who can catch the artist's imagination and understand the message.

For him, life is also an art and we have to live it like an art beautiful and imaginative, we have to look beyond our existence we have to know what life is telling us and what it is all about.

The true artist according to him is the artist who does not take notice of his work, but his work is appreciated by the viewers and viewers appreciate the work, the perception of each viewer would differ some would view the art as an individual piece and others may see it as a whole.

For him, art is an art and not the source of the daily bread earnings. The artist who creates the art with his imagination on the paper or canvas for bringing out his imagination without thinking that it would earn him a bread would create the art that would be for the sake of art.

According to the artist, turns the real into virtual, but the viewers while appreciating the virtual turns into real because they can visualize the pain/happiness of the art for example a child with tears in his eyes. The viewer has an imagination like the child is missing his mother, or he is angry, or there can be n number of reasons the viewers would have in their mind the virtual art is changed by the viewers in various meanings. The artist would have created with the only point in his imagination, but it created various thoughts in the viewers.

Art can heal us it is true if it can stir our thoughts and soul. Art forces us to confront the real world that we had never imagined because it is the most individual form of one’s being.