The Philosophical Position

Anti-mimesis is a philosophical position that holds the direct opposite of mimesis

Mimesis

Mimesis , from μιμεῖσθαι , "to imitate," from μῖμος , "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the...

. Its most notable proponent is Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

, who held in his 1889 essay The Decay of Lying

The Decay of Lying

"The Decay Of Lying - An Observation" is an essay by Oscar Wilde included in his collection of essays titled Intentions, published in 1891. This is a significantly revised version of the article that first appeared in the January 1889 issue of The Nineteenth Century.Wilde presents the essay in a...

that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life". In the essay, written as a Platonic dialogue, Wilde holds that such anti-mimesis "results not merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.".

Wilde's antimimetic philosophy has had influence on later writers, including Brian Friel

Brian Friel

Brian Friel is an Irish dramatist, author and director of the Field Day Theatre Company. He is considered to be the greatest living English-language dramatist, hailed by the English-speaking world as an "Irish Chekhov" and "the universally accented voice of Ireland"...

. McGrath places it in a tradition of Irish writing, including Wilde and writers such as Synge and Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

 that "elevate[s] blarney (in the form of linguistic idealism) to aesthetic and philosophical distinction", noting that Terry Eagleton observes an even longer tradition that stretches "as far back in Irish thought as the ninth-century theology of John Scottus Eriugena" and "the fantastic hyperbole of the ancient sagas". Wilde's antimimetic idealism, specifically, McGrath describes to be part of the late nineteenth century debate between Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

 and Realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

.

Antimimesis, as set out by Wilde in Decay of Lying is the reverse of the Aristotelian principle of mimesis. Far from art imitating life, as mimesis would hold, Wilde holds that art sets the aesthetic principles by which people perceive life. What is found in life and nature is not what is really there, but is that which artists have taught people to find there, through art. Wilde presents the fogs of London as an example, arguing that although "there may have been fogs for centuries in London", people have only "seen" the "wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and turning houses into shadows" because "poets and painters have taught [people] the loveliness of such effects". "They did not exist", asserts Wilde, "till Art had invented them.".

Halliwell asserts that "far from constituting the ne plus ultra of antimimeticism", the notion that life imitates art actually derives from classical notions that can be traced as far back as the writings of Aristophanes of Byzantium

Aristophanes of Byzantium

Aristophanes of Byzantium was a Greek scholar, critic and grammarian, particularly renowned for his work in Homeric scholarship, but also for work on other classical authors such as Pindar and Hesiod. Born in Byzantium about 257 BC, he soon moved to Alexandria and studied under Zenodotus,...

, and does not negate mimesis but rather "displace[s] its purpose onto the artlike fashioning of life itself". Halliwell draws a parallel between Wilde's philosophy and Aristophanes' famous question about the comedies written by Menander

Menander

Menander , Greek dramatist, the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy, was the son of well-to-do parents; his father Diopeithes is identified by some with the Athenian general and governor of the Thracian Chersonese known from the speech of Demosthenes De Chersoneso...

: "O Menander and Life! Which of you took the other as your model?", noting, however, that Aristophanes was a pre-cursor to Wilde, and not necessarily espousing the positions that Wilde was later to propound.

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

 agreed with Wilde. In his preface to Three Plays he wrote "I have noticed that when a certain type of feature appears in painting and is admired as beautiful, it presently becomes common in nature; so that the Beatrices and Francescas in the picture galleries of one generation come to life as the parlor-maids and waitresses of the next.". He stated that he created the aristocratic characters in Cashel Byron's Profession as more priggish than real aristocrats because at the time of writing he had yet to discover that "what [he] supposed to be the real world does not exist, and that men and women are made by their own fancies in the image of the imaginary creatures in [his] youthful fictions, only much stupider". Shaw, however, disagreed with Wilde on some points. He considered most attempts by life to imitate art to be reprehensible, in part because the art that people generally chose to imitate was idealistic and romanticized.

The Art Institute of Chicago

"Life Imitating Art" is the name of an annual photo challenge game at the Art Institute of Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...

sponsored by The International Bedlam Society. Teams of participants take pictures of themselves imitating the artwork, competing for accuracy, creativity, and humor. TIBS has publicly stated that the contest is "meant to carry on the anti-mimetic tradition". Additional unofficial instances of people photographing themselves imitating artwork have been reported in other cities and museums.