The Indispensable East by Oscar Wilde — Read

What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those / arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history of these arts / in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its / frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its / dislike to the actual representation of any object in Nature, and our own / imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in / Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe / by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative / work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic / conventions, and the things that Life has not are invented and fashioned / for her delight. But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our / work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Modern / tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad / expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty / whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We / are beginning to weave possible carpets in England, but only because we / have returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets / of twenty years ago, with their solemn depressing truths, their inane / worship of Nature, their sordid reproductions of visible objects, have / become, even to the Philistine, a source of laughter. A cultured / Mahomedan once remarked to us, "You Christians are so occupied in / misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of / making an artistic application of the second. " He was perfectly right, / and the whole truth of the matter is this: The proper school to learn art / in is not Life but Art. -- _The Decay of Lying_.