"Magic is essentially lies, cheats, dishonesty, trickery, and deceit."

What is your view on the above statement?

P.S Doesn't this sounds like an eng argumentative composition?
;)

that statement is not complete.

Forgot about amazement, art, beauty, patter, knowledge, entertainment. and more.

When you lie, trick, be dishonest, cheat and deceive, you don't necessarily make it art, make it beautiful, make it interesting, make it knowledgable, make it entertaining or make it amazing.

makes sense?

But this can only be acheived by a competent performer, right? And thus essentially isn't it all about deceit and .....?

:(

essentially yes, if we shud ignore all the connotations and stuff.

but there are lots of cheating and deceit in the world which is not considered magic, so magic must be more than that.

it is the crafting of such elements into an art which ppl can enjoy.

Yes.... I agree that Magic is essentially lies, cheats, dishonesty, trickery, and deceit.....

Magic is the art of producing illusions...... And illusion is something that deceives or misleads intellectually....

We cannot really levitate....we don't have the ability to read minds....

We just try our best to make people believe that we can do all this... in other words we are lying to them....

However this statement should only be true in the magician's point of view..... To the audience Magic means Real Magic..... Its our job to prevent our audience from thinking that the statement is true

And when we are performing.... we should totally forget the fact that magic is essentially lies and deceit....we should believe that magic is real... then we can make our audience believe that as well....

Thats what I think :)

In a way it's how we do it and not what we do. Also the ultimate purpose of doing magic is not for personal gain but to entertain.

i agree that magic is about lies, cheats, dishonesty, trickery, and deceit.....

we use it to entertain.Its a art. as long as we do not do things against the law, i think its fine...

If magic is deceit, then the reason why we are 'decieving' ppl is to amaze them, to entertain them. So if the intention of the 'LIES' are good, they might as well be white lies.

As far as magic goes, we are not cheating people out of their money, or possessions. We are not selling some color changing magic stone to an old woman and telling them it can cure them of illnesses. When we perform, we are just bringing them miracles, an experience of the unknown.

How is that deceitful?

Just my $0.02.

;)