Art and the Incompetence of Oscar Wilde

Last week, my art professor made us read the preface of The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. In the preface, Wilde says that the artist is a creator of beautiful things yet claims that all art is useless; meaning that (according to my professor) something that is used outside of its original function, like a broken teapot, to create some form of art, like a still life, is itself art.

I did not agree with the professor’s assertion of what is to be considered art. The object itself is not art, it is the artist’s rendering of the object that is art.

The artwork is the expressive medium of a certain object between the artist and viewer. When Van Gogh painted Sunflowers in 1888, the sunflowers in the vase are not themselves art, but it is Van Gogh’s perception of the sunflowers in his painting. When one goes to an art gallery and looks at a planting or a statue, they are not looking at the model that the statue was derived from or the landscape that was painted. The audience is only looking at the artist’s rendering of the model, not the model itself.

Art itself is an interpretation, a symbol, of the human experience. It can display happiness, fear, or anger and can influence the viewer with these emotions. An artist’s work is the artist’s biography. One can tell a lot about an artist by the way in which the artist displays the object in his or her work. When you are looking at a painting in an art gallery, you are not just looking at paint on a canvas. You are looking at a person’s observation of the world around him.