Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie

by Shelton Waldrep

By printing the title "Professor of Aesthetics" on his visiting cards, Oscar Wilde announced yet another transformation-and perhaps the most significant of his career, proclaiming his belief that he could redesign not just his image but his very self. Shelton Waldrep explores the cultural influences at play in Wilde's life and work and his influence on the writing and performance of the twentieth century, particularly on the lives and careers of some of its most aestheticized Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and David Bowie. As Waldrep reveals, Wilde's fusing of art with commerce foresaw the coming century's cultural producers who would blend works of both "high art" and mass-market appeal. Whether as a gay man or as a postmodern performance artist ahead of his time, Wilde ultimately emerges here as the embodiment of the twentieth-century media-savvy artist who is both subject and object of the aesthetic and economic systems in which he is enmeshed. Shelton Waldrep is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. He is the coauthor of Inside the Work and Play at Disney World (1995) and editor of The The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture (2000).

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oscar Wilde was a brilliant thinker, and he realigns his character and performer/writer into one of the 20th century's geniuses. He was amazing in his forethought and self belief, and now that all his possible contenders are gone(read Capote and Bowie especially), who is there in the 21st century to take up his mantle?

[Lucinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best essay about the re-invention of gender and the aesthetics of dandyism from the 19th century onwards so far.