Oscar Wilde’s article, “The Critic as Artist,” makes some very good points showing that the critique of something can be just as much a work of art as the object itself. He points out that a review can still be very creative and well-written even if it is about a lack-luster piece of art. Through most of his article, he seems to be much harder on the regular artists than on the critics. At times, he even seems to dislike the artists. “Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.” I agree with Wilde in his arguments that critiques can be a form of art in themselves, but I think that he gets carried away in regarding them as better than other art forms. Reviews do sometimes surpass their subjects, but without art there is nothing for a review to be written about. I usually think that actually experiencing something would be more powerful than reading someone else’s opinion of that experience. Overall, Oscar Wilde made sense in why he believed critiques to be art, but I thought that his ideas seemed extreme in many places.
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2 comments:
Hey Allison, nice article. I enjoyed the part where you talk about experiencing art versus reading about it and I think thats a very important point to make when distinguishing between the two.
This has a good deal of your own voice in it, and is less of an academic response, which i think in this particular case is very good. Well done.
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