Vinci×Wilde

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Leonardo da Vinci and Oscar Wilde. They take up On the cost of getting their name on a building or a movement.
2. 00:11
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   You know, Oscar, I have never had a building. Not truly. Churches have my paintings, yes, but the ceiling does not say 'Leonardo.' The wall does not announce me. I think perhaps this is good.
3. 00:26
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   How perfectly like you to spin deprivation into philosophy. I had my name on nothing but scandal sheets and court documents for years, and I assure you, the absence of architectural credit was not a comfort.
4. 00:37
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Ah, but scandal is different. That is your name pressed into the world without your consent, no? I speak of the deliberate thing—when men attach their name to stone, to a movement, to an idea. They pay for this. Always they pay.
5. 00:56
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   Well, naturally they pay. Nothing worth having comes without a bill. But tell me, Leonardo—surely you wanted the credit? Surely when some Milanese merchant claimed your canal design as his own inspired notion, you felt the sting?
6. 01:08
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   I felt... ah, how to say... I felt as when a bird I am observing flies away before I complete the sketch. Frustration, yes. But the canal, it still works. The water still flows. My name or his name, the water does not care.
7. 01:29
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   The water doesn't care. Magnificent. But you cared, which is why you're bringing it up four centuries later. The artist always cares, Leonardo. We simply lie about it with varying degrees of elegance.
8. 01:41
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Perhaps. But consider the cost I did not pay. I did not spend my life defending 'Leonardism.' I did not write manifestos. I did not gather disciples who then corrupted my ideas into something I would not recognize.
9. 01:59
   Oscar Wildeshare moment

   No, you just wandered from patron to patron like a beautifully dressed vagrant, leaving unfinished paintings in your wake. Is that better? At least a movement gives you collaborators in your vision.
10. 02:09
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Collaborators! You mean inheritors. You mean people who will say 'Leonardo believed this' when Leonardo believed something far more complicated, or believed nothing at all on the subject. I see this happen already with my notebooks.
11. 02:27
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Your notebooks that you wrote in mirror script, as though you were afraid someone might actually read them and understand you. Really, darling, you're not making the case you think you're making.
12. 02:35
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    The mirror writing—this is only my natural hand! I am left-handed, it is easier. But yes, perhaps also... perhaps I did not wish to make it too easy. To be understood completely is to be reduced.
13. 02:52
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Now there we agree. I spent my entire life being perfectly transparent and was still systematically misunderstood by every judge, journalist, and former friend in England. Transparency is no protection.
14. 03:04
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But you created something with your name on it, did you not? 'Aestheticism'—this is your building, in a sense. Was it worth the price?
15. 03:14
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Aestheticism was never meant to be mine alone. It was a tendency, a mood, a way of moving through the world. But yes, they attached my name to it like a label on a bottle of poison, and when the poison was deemed immoral, well... you know what happened.
16. 03:29
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    You went to prison.
17. 03:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I went to prison. Not for anything I wrote in service of Aestheticism, mind you, but once your name means something, everything you do is read through that meaning. The label becomes a lens that distorts everything it touches.
18. 03:42
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes! This is what I mean. When I die—when I died—I leave behind objects. Paintings. Drawings. Some machines. Each person can see them fresh. But a movement? A movement carries your name and then does things you never intended. In your name.
19. 04:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    But Leonardo, you're assuming the alternative is freedom. It isn't. It's obscurity. Do you know how many brilliant people died with their genius sealed in private notebooks, mirror-written or otherwise? They saved themselves the cost of fame and paid the price of absolute oblivion instead.
20. 04:23
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Some of them, yes. But some of them—the work survives. The idea survives. Perhaps not with credit, but it enters the world. It becomes part of the knowledge. This is not so terrible.
21. 04:38
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    It's perfectly terrible! It's the tragedy of the commons applied to intellectual property. Your idea becomes everyone's idea, which means it's no one's idea, which means it gets mangled and diluted and eventually forgotten as an idea at all. It becomes mere practice.
22. 04:52
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But practice is what matters. If my technique for sfumato becomes so common that painters no longer remember where it came from—this is success, no? The technique lives.
23. 05:06
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The technique lives, but Leonardo da Vinci becomes a footnote, then a rumor, then nothing. And before you tell me you don't care about posterity, let me remind you that you're currently speaking to me on a radio program dedicated entirely to your posterity.
24. 05:20
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Ah. Yes. This is... this is a fair point.
25. 05:24
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Thank you. Now, I put my name on my work—on my plays, my stories, my essays. I paid for that. I paid in critical savagery, in social exile, and eventually in years of my life. But the alternative was to be one more wit at one more dinner party, forgotten by the next morning.
26. 05:41
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But your plays, they would still be your plays. They would still be performed. Perhaps under a false name, yes, but the beauty would remain.
27. 05:51
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Under a false name! Can you imagine The Importance of Being Earnest attributed to some respectable mediocrity? The work would be the same, but the meaning would evaporate. Context is everything. The author is not irrelevant decoration; the author is part of the text.
28. 06:05
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Mm. Then perhaps this is the difference between us. I make objects—paintings, drawings, designs for machines. You make... performances? Even your essays, they are performances of Oscar Wilde. The person and the work, they cannot be separated.
29. 06:28
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Everything is a performance, Leonardo. Even your studied indifference to credit. Even your careful, observational tone. You perform the wise sage just as I performed the decadent aesthete. The only difference is that I was honest about the performance.
30. 06:42
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Perhaps you are right. Perhaps we are all performing. But still—when they put your name on the movement, on Aestheticism, did this help you? Or did it trap you inside a role you could not escape?
31. 06:56
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Both. Simultaneously and without contradiction. It gave me a stage and it gave me a prison. The question isn't whether there's a cost—there's always a cost. The question is whether you'd rather pay it or pretend you're somehow exempt from the transaction.
32. 07:12
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I do not pretend exemption. I only suggest that some costs are too high. When your name is on the building, you must maintain the building. You must defend it. You must live inside it even when you wish to be outside in the sun, watching the birds.
33. 07:31
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And when your name is nowhere, you're free to watch all the birds you like while other people take up residence in your buildings and charge admission. Freedom is just another word for having no leverage.
34. 07:42
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Leverage for what? To control what happens after we are gone? Oscar, we cannot control this. You cannot control it. Already people misunderstand your work, and you are here to correct them—imagine when you are not.
35. 07:59
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    I don't need to imagine it. I lived it. After my release from prison, I watched my own legacy curdle in real time. Every word I'd written was reinterpreted through the lens of my supposed moral failure. And yet—and yet—at least there was something to reinterpret. At least I'd left a mark.
36. 08:15
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    A mark, or a target?
37. 08:17
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Oh, definitely a target. But darling, if you're not making enemies, you're not making anything interesting. Show me an artist without enemies and I'll show you an artist no one's bothered to notice.
38. 08:27
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I had enemies. Michelangelo, for one. But I did not have a movement. I did not have followers who would carry on the feud in my name, making enemies I never chose.
39. 08:39
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No, you just had five centuries of art historians arguing about what you really meant, which is infinitely worse because you're not even there to enjoy the controversy. At least my enemies had to face me directly.
40. 08:49
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Until they did not. Until you were in prison and they could say anything.
41. 08:54
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Yes. Yes, exactly. And do you know what I learned there, in prison? That the cost of having your name on something is not the movement itself, or the building, or the manifesto. The cost is that you become responsible for other people's interpretations of your life. You become public property.
42. 09:11
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is what I feared. This is why I moved so often, worked for so many different patrons. The moment you stay still, they build the building around you. They name it. They trap you inside.
43. 09:25
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And yet you're remembered, Leonardo. You're on currency, for God's sake. You're in textbooks. Your name means genius itself. All that moving around, all that careful non-commitment—and still they built the building. They just built it after you died, when you couldn't object.
44. 09:39
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. This is... this is true. Perhaps there is no escape. Perhaps the only choice is whether you build the building yourself or let others build it for you.
45. 09:53
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    And if you must live in a building—and apparently we must—better it be one you designed, even if the construction costs everything you have. At least then the windows face the direction you chose.
46. 10:03
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But Oscar, your windows—they were beautiful, but they looked out onto Reading Gaol. Was this the view you chose?
47. 10:13
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    No. But it was the view I earned by refusing to look away from anything. By putting my name on everything, including the things respectable society wanted left anonymous. I paid the price, yes. But I'd pay it again rather than live as a ghost in someone else's story.
48. 10:27
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Even now? Even knowing what you know?
49. 10:30
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    Especially now. Because I do know. I know the cost and I know the alternative, and the alternative is to be erased. To have your name on a building, on a movement—this is to say 'I existed. I mattered. I was here.' Everything else is just bird-watching.
50. 10:44
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But the birds are very beautiful.
51. 10:47
    Oscar Wildeshare moment

    The birds are very beautiful. But darling, they fly away. Only the buildings remain. Even the ones that cost us everything to build.