Girls gone Wilde
Oscar Wilde's tomb, Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
“A kiss may ruin a human life.” — Oscar Wilde
Not sure if his mourners caught the quote, the irony I guess, and how above the tomb is a relief sculpture of some modernist flying angel whose male genitalia has since been vandalized, i.e. castrated, its whereabouts unknown. (Gender bending aside, someone’s gonna make a killing on eBay.) Like forever gumdrops on the pavement, these stone kisses are the graffiti of mouths, signifying that warm wet landing spot we all aim towards with eyes closed, as if seeing past the person.
“To Be Natural Is Such A Difficult Pose To Keep Up”
Salvador Dali and Gala Dali (1936)
Blockquotes excerpted from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” dedicated to Oscar Wilde.
Critics on Criticism: Oscar Wilde
From “The Critic as Artist”:
To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.
