Anti-Mimesis is the philosophical stance that Art influences life. It stands in opposition to the idea of Mimesis, popularized by Aristotle; the idea that art attempts to mimic the perfection of life.
Paradox though it may seem–and paradoxes are always dangerous things–it is none the less true that Life **imitates art far more than Art imitates life.
We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of 'The Golden Stair,' the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the 'Laus Amoris,' the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in 'Merlin's Dream.'
And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher
Wilde, Decay of LyingWilde, Decay of Lying
#litnote
story of girl becoming mesmerized by hypersigil
Here the imitation, as far as it went, was of course accidental.
In the following case the imitation was self-conscious. In the
year 187...
'The Day Dream' by Rossetti
An artist dreams up or creates from nothing in art. Then life begins to warp around the art. People style their fashion around popular art. Art precedes and life follows. Wilde implies that the propensity of life to mimic works of art is not caused by the imagination but rather by a natural state of Fact . That reality will always seek to reproduce fiction. The imagination seeks to find new form- and life inevitably falls into the form created by imagination
References
Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying