Oscar Wilde Quotes About Art
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An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
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It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
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God and other artists are always a little obscure.
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Art never expresses anything but itself.
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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. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
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What of Art? -It is a malady. --Love? -An Illusion. --Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. --You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. --What are you? -To define is to limit.
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All bad art is the result of good intentions.
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Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
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Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
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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.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie.
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Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.
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The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.
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One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
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The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.
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M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.
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Freedom, individualism and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.
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The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.
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Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
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In art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.
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Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that 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 comes into existence.
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Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
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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. You must find it in life and re-create it in art.
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What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
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Art, like Nature, has her monsters
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The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.
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Beauty ...is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.
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The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.
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Music is the perfect type of art.
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Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.
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If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.
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