Christa Giles

170
admiration for the purely decorative was often explicitly
articulated:
Art begins with abstract decoration, with
purely imaginative and pleasurable work
dealing with what is unreal and non-existent.
This is the first stage. Then Life becomes
fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to
be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes
life as part of her rough material, recreates,
and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely
indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams
and keeps between herself and reality the
impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of
decorative or ideal treatment. 449
The decorative becomes an end in itself and yet, still can
convey meaning. It is in a kind of limbo between utter
decoration and meaning that the decadent wishes to live.
Narcissistic self-consciousness is both a by-product and a
motivating force in such art. When Beardsley said, ˝I have
one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am
nothing,˝ 450 he speaks of an excess of artificiality which he
identified with beauty; and naturally, both Wilde and
Huysmans identified artificiality with beauty and saw it as
a means of dominating nature through the temperament of
the artist. Style is the form that self-expression takes, but