Who Is Imitating Whom?

These essays, written over the nine years since the appearance of Vivas’ Creation and Discovery, explain and refine and apply the concepts set forth in that important landmark of American aesthetics. Most of them are aimed at the “imitation” theory of art—a dragon which evidently cannot take too much slaying, since Vivas finds imitationists and crypto-imitationists lurking everywhere.

Though I must admit, right off, that I am now and have ever been an imitationist, I entirely agree with Vivas’ criticism of those who demand, from an art object and its observer, a constant reference outward, away from the artifact to some particular or composite “model.” For them a poem on, let us say, the sunset, is a kind of pointer, a sign-post in the woods showing us the way to Sunset Ridge. Once we get to the ridge, once we have the real sunset (or some particular effect within it) pointed out to us, the pointer is of no further use. It is simply a distraction. It is even—as Plato said, but for reasons other than his—the imitation of an imitation, since the poem undoubtedly uses words and devices borrowed from other descriptions of sunsets. But all descriptions fall short of the reality; all imitations must give way before the original. So art, in this theory, is suicidal—it shows how much better real sunsets are than the ersatz ones of Turner. The perfect poem obliterates itself.

GW

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Garry Wills

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These essays, written over the nine years since the appearance of Vivas’ Creation and Discovery, explain and refine and apply the concepts set forth in that important landmark of American aesthetics. Most of them are aimed at the “imitation” theory of art—a dragon which evidently cannot take too much slaying, since Vivas finds imitationists and crypto-imitationists lurking everywhere.

Though I must admit, right off, that I am now and have ever been an imitationist, I entirely agree with Vivas’ criticism of those who demand, from an art object and its observer, a constant reference outward, away from the artifact to some particular or composite “model.” For them a poem on, let us say, the sunset, is a kind of pointer, a sign-post in the woods showing us the way to Sunset Ridge. Once we get to the ridge, once we have the real sunset (or some particular effect within it) pointed out to us, the pointer is of no further use. It is simply a distraction. It is even—as Plato said, but for reasons other than his—the imitation of an imitation, since the poem undoubtedly uses words and devices borrowed from other descriptions of sunsets. But all descriptions fall short of the reality; all imitations must give way before the original. So art, in this theory, is suicidal—it shows how much better real sunsets are than the ersatz ones of Turner. The perfect poem obliterates itself.