Art’s Conception at the Hands of Others (critical response to Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist”)

By James Spica

During a time of artistic redefinition in larger proportion than had ever been seen in such a short period, Oscar Wilde, at the forefront of intellectual thought, was responsible for multiple crucial points upon which fine art hinged. In his “The Critic as Artist”, he not only elevates critics, but explains the emergence of ‘new art’, a subject of much upheaval during a decade (the 1890s) which saw the middle of absurdism and impressionism and emergence of existentialism and fauvism. Such art-theorizing was quite necessary and merited at such a moment.

He makes abundantly clear in this piece that the appearance of ‘new art’ (genres, forms, schools etc.) is born of the conflict between the critic and the artist. He writes; “Each new school, as it appears, cries out against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man that it owes its origin. (p.902).” He goes on to expound upon the way in which the critic, in individual (and indeed personal) discovery of meaning (“[finding that] the picture becomes more beautiful than it really is (p.906)… …[via] understanding of others [by way of] intensifying [one’s] own individualism (p.910)”), elevates the art far beyond its maker’s intentions.

This confirms the fact that art cannot survive without the critical spirit, and the critical spirit is likewise dependant upon art as food. It also defines the surfacing of new schools of art and indeed thought. But it raises a fundamental question—who creates the art? This is currently a point of major disagreement and discussion. By Wilde’s theory, the critic may be as pivotal in the creation of the art as the artist himself, because it is the critic that elevates the art, in his “revealing to us a secret of which [the art and artist] know nothing (p.910)”, to a fully artistic status. The late contemporary art theorist Allan Kaprow suggests that the museum curator makes the art art, as it is his word that puts it in the museum, and that which is in an art museum, to the minds of most museum-goers, is art.