bill:
I think Wilde may have been stressing the importance of breaking free of certain constraints imposed by a society conditioned by values that produce self-alienation. It is perhaps in this sense that art may be considered an instrument of emancipation, emancipation from the imperatives of capitalist system maintenance. Unfortunately it is difficult to think of an example that hasn't immediately been co-opted and exploited by the dominant culture to serve it's own ends.Barry:
What Wilde was saying was that the artist must be 'above' his and her audience---and I maintain that this was what his audience demanded of him. Had Wilde said something to the effect that the only truly great art was the art of collaboration, of cooperation, then he would have starved in a garret. Wilde, like so many others, was exemplifying the independent spirit of aristocracy, he was assisting the aristocracy in reifying itself; when Wilde 'crossed' the aristocracy, he realized (in jail) what it meant to be 'tied' to his public...
bill:
Well, as with so many things, there are several ways of interpreting people and events. While his "art for art's sake" crusade lent itself to parody of an aristocratic class accustomed to a life without work, his message was not entirely embraced by that class. Following are some excerpts from an article on Wilde:
" If Wilde's avowal of extreme aestheticism, on the one hand, and socialism, on the other, seems peculiar, it should be noted that these were by no means considered mutually exclusive intellectual tendencies either in England or on the Continent in the 1890s.
"Nonetheless, what is one to make of an aesthetic that declares "All art is quite useless"? The problem has to be approached historically.
"Plekhanov, in his Art and Social Life, argued convincingly that "the belief in art for art's sake naturally arises among artists wherever they are out of harmony with the society around them." He wrote that it was natural that the French Romantics "were revolted by the idea of `useful art.' In their eyes, to make art useful was tantamount to
making it serve the bourgeoisie whom they despised so profoundly."
"In his work on Wilde, Roditi says, "As a conscientious objector to the social order in which he lived, many a nineteenth-century artist ... sought evidence of his own integrity in his utter uselessness." Farther on he writes: "In an ugly age, Wilde believed that art should not imitate life but art." Wilde wrote, "To project one's soul into some
gracious form" is "perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims."
"He rejected an art of "moral uplift," practised by a vast array of Victorian writers, which amounted, in the final analysis, to a legitimising of existing institutions and conditions. To defend himself and his work he was obliged to state, and believe, that "Art never expresses anything but itself." But few artists, paradoxically, have been more consumed at such a deep level by moral and social commitments. (G.B. Shaw pointed out that when he attempted to get various literary figures in London to sign a petition asking for a reprieve for the Haymarket defendants, Wilde was the only one who signed.)..."
" So too in politics Wilde rose far above the Fabians, his contemporaries and supposed co-thinkers. In his deeply humane and subversive essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde, in fact, heaped scorn on piecemeal approaches to the social ills produced by capitalism. Of the reformers he said, "their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it....The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible."
"Wilde reminds us forcefully that there is a visionary component to socialist consciousness when he writes, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at."
"One might put the matter this way: Wilde expressed many truths which, due to his class background, the nature and tone of his times and, equally significantly, the undeveloped, and somewhat unreceptive, state of socialism in England, took the form of paradoxical quips, but which in reality pointed toward critical intellectual issues of the 20th century. They could only make themselves known to those acutely attuned
to the broadest questions bound up with the transformation of society.
"It should come as no surprise then that Trotsky's Literature and Revolution bears traces of Wilde's influence, interpreted through the prism of a historical materialist outlook. While Wilde baldly asserts that socialism will be of value chiefly "because it will lead to Individualism," Trotsky writes, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, that "heightening of the objective quality and the subjective consciousness of individuality [in the proletariat] is the most valuable contribution of the cultural advance at the threshold of which we stand today."
"Wilde insisted that life had to be remade along aesthetic lines. "Now Art should never try to be popular," he wrote. "The public should try to make itself artistic." The modern world trusted "to Socialism and to Science as its methods" to do away "with poverty, and the suffering that it entails," that when man had accomplished this task, "he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself." A century later his thought retains its full validity." - David Walsh International Worker
::: So what are we left with?
1. Art (co-opted?) in the service of the dominant ideology - the 'Culture Industry', or
2. Art as a communicable experience which may result in a different (potentially revolutionary) way of viewing the world?
Barry
In my opinion, what we are left with is what we have always had---and will always have: an attractive display of cultural values. Art will not change the way anyone views the world; the world will have to come first, like the substance produces the shadow (to paraphrase Henry James)...
bill:
Well, like I said at the beginning, art is a very complicated subject. Yes, the world comes first. And certainly art can be considered decorative display. And yes there are elitists who would make claims about High Art, Beauty, Truth, etc. But we are interested in mechanisms of transformation. You stated in another post: 'some phylogenic behavior may have had an ontogenic origin.' There is always interplay between the individual and the environment. To put it in materialistic dialectics, products or impacts of an organism create new conditions to which those organisms must then respond. Art may also be response.
bill
