Art and Idea

Art and Idea

Have you ever wondered about the Idea of an idea? The famous writer Oscar Wilde wrote an essay titled The Decay of Lying. In this work, Wilde expresses his opinion that Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life.

Wilde believed that life imitates art, so to express through the energy of creative expression is a prime concern. Artists provide ways to show the world their particular vision in words, images, movement, and sound - alone or in combination. The artist creates a work of art that adds to the enjoyment of experiencing it by taking the reader/viewer beyond a systematic understanding of the world.

Paul Cezanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter, painted Mt. St Victoire over 60 times in his life. He created a vision of the mountain he could see from his village, Aix-en-Provence, and gave viewers ways to see what he saw. He took a concept of the mountain and shared it. He demonstrated a mountain could be more than a mountain. It can be a mindscape of creativity.

The artist’s idea, the importance of the inspiration, has a long history in the Western world that goes back to classical times, and beyond when you consider the non-Western world. Plato’s discussion of mimesis, or imitation, contends what we see as real is not Reality, but only a poor imitation. The object, say a chair, is a poor imitation of the original chair that exists in the perfect, unchanging realm of The Ideas. This philosophy has a corollary in Eastern metaphysical thought: this entire material existence is not real. It’s an illusion that we ascribe to, a collective view. And the only thing that is Real is the unchanging realm not marred by death and destruction. Oddly, these two thought systems, Plato’s Ideas in which the only real existence is the concept - the Idea of the chair that exists in a perfect realm - is not very different from the Eastern philosophical approach that the only real world is the world of the unchanging.

The debate goes on between mimesis, imitation, and the idea of the thing itself. Michelangelo supported the approach that the only real art was the concept in the artist’s mind. Today we call that “intellectual property.” The idea, the concept, is what drives the creation. Plenty of lawyers make their living defending the primacy of The Idea when someone infringes upon their clients’ intellectual property. Who knew Plato would be so relevant in 2020 courtrooms?

The writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra merges Idea and Reality. We see his concept through Cervantes’ eyes when his character Don Quixote looks at people and scenes and gives us new ways of seeing. In this passage, Don Quixote describes how destiny guides our fortunes:

“Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is noble, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.” “What giants?” Asked Sancho Panza. “The ones you can see over there,” answered his master, “with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.” “Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.” “Obviously,” replied Don Quixote, “you don’t know much about adventures.”

Excerpt from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Through writing and all the arts, we begin to see the mundane world through the imaginative world of the artist/creator. Oscar Wilde’s quote, “life imitates art far more than art imitates life” (The Decay of Lying, 1891) expresses the concept that art affects the way we look at the world around us.

When you look at windmills, what do YOU see?