Life imitates art far more than art imitates life by Oscar Wilde - Essay Example

Life Imitates Art In 1889, Oscar Wilde declared in his essay The Decay of Lying his most thought pertaining to the capa of life for imitative instinct: "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life." This is in opposition to the conventional relationship between life and art wherein the latter is perceived to be created in order to mimic the former or that life serves as the fundamental material for art. Interestingly, this expression is true in many respects. This is fundamentally anchored on Wildean philosophy that Life is constantly finding ways to express or be expressed and that art provides the tools and platforms by which such nature and purpose could be realized.

George Bernard Shaw is one of those who were quick to side with Wilde. When he wrote his opus, Three Plays for Puritans, he argued that "when a certain type of feature appears in painting and is admired as beautiful, it presently becomes common in nature; so that the Beatrices and Francescas in the picture galleries of one generation come to life as the parlor-maids and waitresses of the next" (xix). This is also not unlike when fads and trends emerge after it appears on films and videos especially today with the permeation of content-rich media.

This phenomenon is not limited to the visual art because it is also true in cases of literature and other cultural artifacts. For instance, not a few real life stories have been patterned after Romeo and Juliet or Ophelia or Tristan and Isolde. Remarking about the penchant of people to pattern their experiences out of the characters of this literary masterpieces, Kirwan explained that stories are a way of taming the world wherein the uncultivated is systematized into stories that we can tell ourselves and feel good about (150).

What this tells us is that art can dictate a particular way of life or an aspect of it because the way it represents substance, notoriety or sophistication, among other concepts attached to it, it appeals to people as they negotiate their relationships within a community. For some, there is a need to standout, for others, notoriety or substance. Every year, the Art Institute of Chicago holds a photo competition that works around the theme of life imitating art. Here participants shoot photographs of themselves or of others as they copy and imitate artworks in various states of fidelity, some with uncanny accuracy, while some are tinged with a sense of humor and creativity.

An excellent example of an initiative in this kind of literal tradition was when several years ago, the town of Beloit in Wisconsin depicted George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte (see photo). The success of these initiatives underscore the fact that there is always a reason to imitate artistic creations or elements within it especially in a period wherein consumerism and popular culture deprives many things with substance. The significance of Wilde’s claim about life and art is its insistence on the idea that art could actually enable us to perceive reality differently or from a whole new perspective including the way we view ourselves both as individuals and beings that interact and forge relationships with others.

It is from this context that we can recognize how art could actually fashion what is real up to some point.Work Cited Kirwan, James. Literature, rhetoric, metaphysics: literary theory and literary aesthetics. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.Shaw, Bernard. Three Plays for Puritans by Bernard Shaw Being the Third Volume of His Collected Plays. New York: The Trow Press, 1906.