“’Then why won’t you exhibit his portrait?’ asked Lord Henry.
‘Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have never cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never know anything about it. But the world might guess it; and I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry—too much of myself!’
‘Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run too many editions.’
‘I hate them for it’ cried Hallward. ‘An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into the painting. 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. Someday I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.’
‘I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won’t argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue…’” (Page 9)
Art is a funny thing. It makes the brains of some explode, and the hearts of some tingle. The nature of art; however, is to challenge. Often in different ways but it always challenges something. To think, to act, to change, to love, to hate, to mourn, to rejoice, to be inspired, to inspire. The rather sad part about art’s transformation from the Romantics to the Post Modernists is the one which takes place from artist to viewer. In the modern world people don’t think. They don’t think about the past. They don’t think about the present. They don’t think about the future. And they certainly don’t think before they speak. How can an artist then, challenge a man to think in new ways, when he is bored with the old ways? No, the only thing an artist can do now is appeal to pleasure. Ay, this complex has not left. It’s intensified. Modern art, for those that think, appears thoughtless, foolish, random. Though in fact, it is full of unnamed philosophies, of messages too deep to express. The artist hasn’t changed much, there will always be those auto-biographizing scoundrels to pompous to let art be her own teacher. Rather, the paintings of today, and the films, music, literature: it appeals to the children’s minds barely fitting in the skulls of the wealthy critic on whose abject authority art is told its meaning. Art is abstract as always, today we deal with viewers who spoil it for the rest for Lord Henry and Basil, it was the artist who seemed unable to adequately hide himself enough in his work.
It seems as if Basil believed that art should take on a more shallow role, and thus challenge the viewers of his day (who by the way were curious enough to venture as to think) to find their own personal philosophical and psychological meanings out of the shallow. He desired to let the viewer find the meaning of deepness in the shallow, while today, the successful artist must print the shallow across the deep so as not to intimidate the not so curious, unstable minds of this ignorant populous.
In Lord Henry’s response to Basil’s first rant, he promulgated, that even poets (who seemed to represent the extremists of the art world at that time) understood that passion and emotion are tools for publication, and that their purpose lies therein. Hallward, on the other hand, was always the anxious Romantic. Perhaps, his love for Dorian Gray was in fact a romantic one in itself, and the embarrassment which that brought heightened his already sensitive worrying. In the present day, such feelings of guilt or conscience are so finely weaned out of our minds that such an issue is not at all rare, scarcely even frowned upon. This however, is not the point.
Personally, it seems clear that the good artist as I believe Lord Henry was dabbling at, is one that does not take himself completely out of his painting, but in it, weaves his own emotion, his love, his hate, his guilt, his joys, his style. According to Basil if two men painted the same scene of a tree from the same spot at the same time of day with the same medium, either the two pieces would be identical, or you would have one good artist and one bad artist, or two bad artists neither of which could accurately paint the tree. Even in the latter two cases, it is not a matter of personal preference. They are just a tree. The only real art: the secret emotions and sinful lusts of unspoken debauchery are gone and you either have two identical trees or you have one tree drawn accurately and one drawn poorly. The artist’s greatest tool to challenge and emote is thusly vanished. No, one must put of himself into the art lest there be no art at all. It is not enough for one to admire the artist for his accuracy. In 50 more years monkeys will recreate images such as these. Art must arise desires in the viewer a photo cannot do, or risk arts destruction.
It is still necessary that an artist does not put so much of himself into a piece that the viewer has no margin to determine the meanings of the piece. Predictable art warrants shallow viewing, shallow viewing suggests bad art. Summarily, good art is ars gratia artis, art for the sake of art. Art is the soul, the artist the body. Both Harry and Basil have merit to their beliefs, and it seems for the sake of argument that they represent polar ends of the spectrum. One thing for sure, art should be beautiful.
“Someday”: Every dreamer and procrastinator’s motto. The idea of dreaming has gotten hitched to ideas of childhood, of whimsy and fantasy. But these are not the dreams to which I refer: the dreams which in the mind of the dreamer are actual goals are the dangerous ones. Dreamer’s someday is never today, just as yesterday can never be tomorrow. (Words have meaning).This is why the portrait was never shown. Basil was a dreamer, a hopeless one at that. Immaterialized action and fear crumpled an anxious man and shuddered a beautiful masterpiece.
Lastly, the last little phrase Lord Henry utters, “I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won’t argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue,” appears to demonstrate one of three things, either a quick way out of an argument you lost, a most mature way of making the loser feel like the winner so as to generously save him the embarrassment of the actual defeat, or thirdly a thought almost too deep to be real. Likely, it is a glorious combination of all three, for it is only the annoyingly thoughtful that can get out of a lost argument still sounding superior making everyone besides he and his opponent think he has won. I know, because I am one. A brilliant combination when played out this way, but often fatal as one loses even when he wins an argument and is made a donkey to those on-looking. His thought is true however, as the few great ones are. ‘Intellectually found’ people do not have a need to argue, because they have nothing to search for.
If only that ideal were possible.
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