The Decay of Lying

The central argument of Wilde’s essay is that lying is necessary to create true art. Wilde relies on the provocative nature of the idea that lying is beneficial and even necessary both to capture readers’ attention and to emphasize his point. Per the aestheticist school of thought, beauty and imagination are held to be the fundamental components of creation, as opposed to artwork that draws from and aims to reproduce real life. Illustrating this, Vivian comments that “those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art” (16). In other words, artists and writers who prioritize telling the truth or trying to accurately represent their subjects based on reality will never succeed in creating great art.

Wilde’s argument is steeped in the aestheticist belief that reality is not and cannot be beautiful, whereas art has beauty as its principal objective. According to this ideology, “lying,” or inventing a work that is artistically beautiful by following artistic conventions is the only way to make worthwhile, timeless art. By centering his essay around lying in art, Wilde hints at the link between art and artifice, which share the same root in Latin.