A review by jasonkatz119
Intentions by Oscar Wilde

4.0

A masterclass in artistic / aesthetic dialectics. He puts together these dialogues that present perfect attitudes conveying aesthetic convictions, and then challenges them, opposes them with other totally consuming, persuasive positions. Super polemical and interesting.

The collection ends with: "Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in æsthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks."