Oh, Gilbert

 Oscar Wilde constructs Art and Criticism as two mirrors that reflect one another; when one is great, the other is great, and when one is poor, then “incompetence applaud[s] its brother.” When it is time to move on, criticism prevents art from reflecting itself forever and gives birth to a knew era.

 Wilde has created two mirrors of his own, Ernest of Art and Gilbert of Criticism. He favors Gilbert—the babbling, romanticizing mouthpiece of “The Critic as Artist”—and from his answers to Ernest's often moronic questions and requests for clarification, crafts two ideal relationships between Criticism and Art that can be consummated into one approach that brightens Criticism, dims Art, and obliterates the distinction between the two.

 Any true critic plays the role of interpreter of art beyond simple summary and base judgments of its worth. “The critic is he who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from that of the work itself,” as Gilbert invokes roles—actor, sculptor, painter—that can be critics just as easily as artists, destroying the commonplace distinction between an artist as a creator and a critic as a reviewer. The Art that only creates and the Criticism that only reviews are the saddest forms of each, and they only achieve their true potential when the critic produces his own Art in his Criticism, giving new perspective to Art where before there was none.

 Good Art is accomplished through the Criticism of form, and good Criticism is accomplished through the production of new Art from old Art, and new form from old form. It is a pretty thought, but its practicality today is suspect. Either we are living in a dim age of Criticism and Art, or we have learned nothing, for the delineation between the artist and the critic is as strong as ever, if not stronger. The critic is still widely regarded as someone who knows how to talk about something he does not know how to do. Harsher judgments of critics have been made, calling the entire profession out for being nothing more than a bitter cadre of failed artists who now rudely criticize as a balm for their own aching souls.

 The easiest thing to do may simply be to believe Gilbert, fanciful as he is. If he is wrong, we are sadder creatures for it. If he is right, our desire to create is all the more beautiful for it, and critics everywhere have new, lofty goals to aspire to. We are all artists—let us create.