“Art Is Useless”

Before we get exercised by this statement by Wilde, we have to understand the proposition he was putting forward. What he was saying is that “Art” has no utilitarian purpose. It exists for itself alone as an expression of beauty, thought, what have you.

Art is not for digging ditches or building houses. And that may be very true, but who can deny that it can inspire men to do things, to take action, to change history. The statement is true and at the same time it is not true. It is not true for the same reason it illustrates another thesis advanced by Wilde. What you see in art, whatever form it takes, does not reflect what you are seeing, hearing, taking in with all your senses. The life it has is what you yourself bring to it with all the potentialities you have. If you see beauty, it is your own capacity to appreciate that, that is awakened in your viewing. If you see evil, it is that capacity in yourself that you recognize in viewing/hearing/ tasting the work of art.

No-one can deny, nevertheless, the capacity of art to inspire all the actions that human beings are capable of.

Needless to say his ideas caused a great deal of heartburn among his contemporaries. The behavior of Dorian Gray in the book, and in a 1945 movie, expressions of homosexuality,  Wilde was arguing, was not in the actions of the characters portrayed in the presentation , but in the confabulations in the minds of the viewers. When Wilde was brought up four years later on charges for acts of “gross indecency”, it put the lie to his assertions.

Yet, what Wilde asserts is patently true. Presentations of art forms achieve their substance and clothing in the perceptions of the viewers. They are works of imagination whatever the fount of inspiration that brought them into being. Unless the author, him or herself acknowledges them as literal products of experience, they achieve their life only in the perceptions of the recipients of the messages being transmitted. They can only have a life if we ourselves have the imagination to conceive what we see and hear.

I think about so much that I have written in the first person and I wonder if I wouldn’t have been much better to have taken Wilde’s thesis to heart. Then I would have had deniability for all my sins.

While I accept the literality of Wilde’s thesis, I believe, along with most of you, in the utility, not to say, the imperative necessity of art to lift us out of ourselves. Yes, and to literally lift us out of our seats of complacency, inertia, and inaction, to defend and advance those things of crucial importance to us when they may be threatened. Time and again, Art, in all its manifold forms, has played a key role in that process. We see this playing out around the world, when people follow symbols, at the risk of their lives, to defend valued things that they believe are threatened.

*This is the final statement made by Oscar Wilde in the Preface of his seminal work The Picture Of Dorian Gray, published in book form in 1891.