Have Watches Become Art?

In roughly chronological order:

Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, with a Preface which ends with the flat statement: "All art is quite useless."

I was born.

The 4th edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2, was published. It contains the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray on pp 1681-82. It does not contain any more of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I was required several times in school and college to read works by Oscar Wilde, including, more than once, The Picture of Dorian Gray, including its Preface, with whose conclusion I disagreed. For most of my life I quite disliked Wilde.


I got a copy of the 5th edition, of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, for a college class. It's much shorter than the combined 2 volumes of the unabridged version. I have no idea whether it contains the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I still own but I can't find it at the moment.

Quartz watches -- watches powered by batteries or some other electrical source, such as light converted to electricity -- reached the point where they kept much better time than mechanical watches -- watches powered by springs -- at a much lower cost.

I saw the movie An Ideal Husband, based on Wilde's play of the same name. It has been filmed at least 4 times: I saw the 1999 version, directed by Oliver Parker, starring Jeremy Northam, Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Minnie Driver and Cate Blanchett. I saw it several years after 1999, on TV, primarily because of Ms Blanchett, about whom I am daffy. Ms Blanchett is particularly adorable in this film. But I liked more than Ms Blanchett, I liked the entire film very much, definitely including those words written by Mr Wilde. I instantly went from being a loather of Wilde to being a huge fan. I re-read the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray and began to seriously wonder whether art is indeed useless. I have not stopped thinking about it. At the present I would agree, if we stipulate that Wilde was being somewhat ironic when he wrote that. Art is not useful in the same way as other things. I agree with Nietzsche that art makes life bearable, which means that it is extremely useful indeed; but still, it is not useful in the same way as other things.

I got the 4th edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2, either free because some place like a university library was giving it away, or for a dollar or so at a thrift shop, I don't remember. I've only got volume 2.

The Coen brothers' film version of Carmac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old Men was released in 2007. The film is set in 1980. The character portrayed by Josh Brolin carries a wrist watch in his pocket. If the film is historically accurate in this detail, it is a mechanical watch. The title of the movie and novel comes from a line in the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats. Like Wilde, Yeats was born in Ireland. Wilde moved to England, where he ingratiated himself with the upper classes. Yeats stayed in Ireland and supported the fight for independence from England.

I began to become fascinated by watches. Mostly by pocket watches at first;

but the more I learn about watches, the more my interest is captured by wrist watches rather than pocket watches, because watches -- mechanical watches. I couldn't tell you much about quartz watches -- keep becoming more sophisticated and precise and interesting, even as they become farther and farther away from being necessary or practical. There are still some mechanical pocket watches being produced today, but as far as I can see, most of them are presented as objects of nostalgia, designed to remind people of bygone eras when most watches were pocket watches, rather than to closely resemble the most modern products of the watchmaker's -- art.

Ha! Right there I said "art." I was never drawn to pocket watches because I'm nostalgic. I like them because I'd rather carry a watch in my pocket than wear it on my wrist, and pocket watches are designed to be carried that way. But almost all of the really interesting stuff in watchmaking is going on in mechanical wrist watches. Which, as good as they are getting, are still much more expensive than quartz watches which keep better time.

But let's face it, very few if any people actually need quartz watches either, what with all of the online devices which keep even better time, which almost all of us use to one extent or another.

And then, earlier today, my interest in watches, which I freely admit serve no practical use, and are only good for fascinating people and making them feel good, clanged together with Wilde's statement that all art is quite useless. And I said to myself, "Hey -- does that mean that watches have become art, or are becoming art?!"

And then I rushed over here to tell you all about it -- first checking the 4th edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, volume 2, to make sure that I got the quote by Wilde right.

PS, 11 Sep 2017: I found it, the version of The Norton Anthology of English Literature which I got for use an an undergrad. And once again we see how faulty is my memory: it is not called the shorter edition, but the Major Authors Edition. And it is not the 5th edition, but the 3rd. And Wilde is not in it AT ALL. It judges 31 English authors, from the author of Beowulf to Auden, to be Major. But not Wilde. Well, as we know, these things are not only quite useless, but also completely subjective.

Sculpture of Oscar Wilde and Eduard Wilde

This is a sculpture of Oscar Wilde, left, and Eduard Wilde, right, in the Estonian city Tartu.

The figures are slightly larger than life-size. Eduard Wilde was born a few years later than Oscar Wilde. Both traveled extensively. It's not known if they ever met, but it's conceivable. Eduard Wilde was a pioneer of critical realism in Estonian literature and a vocal critic of oppression of the Estonians by Tsarist Russia and of German land-barons in Estonia. When the Estonian Republic was founded in 1919 Wilde served for several years as the Estonian ambassador to Germany.

There is a copy of this sculpture in Galway, Ireland.

Philosophy And Politics And Tania Lombrozo's Piece For NPR

In a recent piece for NPR, Tania Lombrozo called for philosophers to be more engaged in public life.

I'm very much interested in philosophy, so why do I have a negative reaction to this NPR article? Perhaps it aroused the Epicurean in me. In ancient Greece, Stoic philosophers believed that the more fortunate members of society had a duty to serve society, while Epicurean philosophers thought that the wise thing to do was to enjoy life with a circle of close fiends and ignore the rest of the world as thoroughly as possible. Perhaps I have a Stoic approach to politics, except that I want to keep my Epicurean philosophy separate from it. Oscar Wilde loved art, including theatre, and he wanted to see society become more democratic and more responsive to the needs of those who needs were greatest, and yet he was opposed to the Realist plays which were in a great vogue during his lifetime, plays which sought to address social inequities. Wilde insisted: "All art is quite useless." Perhaps he felt that plays were the last thing which were suited to enacting great social change. And perhaps my involvement with philosophy boils down to something resembling Wilde's involvement with art -- it's something I dearly love, but I wouldn't recommend it as a cure for society's ills.

If we're going to involve philosophers in public life -- what kind of philosophers? Philosophers tend to constantly and sharply disagree with one another about just about everything imaginable, and have since ancient Greece. As far as I can tell, the most influential single philosopher in the politics of the US of the past 100 years has been Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind and instructor, at the University of Chicago, of a very nasty and powerful brood of Republican neocons.

My favorite philosopher is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was emphatically ivory-tower. He wanted no part of any political party. Epicurean all the way, he was. "Beneath him and behind him" was how, in his opinion, every true philosopher should regard politics. And given Nietzsche's views on women, perhaps it's very much for the best that he never involved himself in politics. (Saying that Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher is far from saying that I agree with him about everything. In fact, I disagree with just about every single thing Nietzsche says about women in his philosophical works. Turning directly from those works to the letters he wrote to actual individual women, it's hard to believe that the misogynistic philosopher and the downright nice letter-writer are one and the same.)

I know of only 2 philosopher-kings, both Roman Emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Julian. Neither one a bad Emperor -- Julian is admirable for his concerted although unsuccessful attempt to oppose Christianity's intolerance of all other religions -- but neither one a particularly interesting philosopher either. (I think a case can be made that both Alexander the Great and Napoleon were philosopher-kings, and quite interesting philosophers, but I mention that only as an aside in this post because the general consensus is that they were not philosophers.)

I must be honest and point out that one reason for my negative response to Lombrozo's article is that I have heard of none of the living philosophers mentioned in it. I read mostly philosophers from bygone eras. Peter Sloterdijk, and dead guys. For all I know, all the people Lombrozo mentioned are perfectly brilliant, and their participation in public life could be nothing but tremendously good, and I'm missing an incredible amount of top-notch philosophizing which puts Sloterdijk to shame. I doubt it, but it's possible.