Oscar Wilde Research Paper

OSCAR WILDE: PHILOSOPHIES ON ART IN DORIAN GREY

Irish writer Oscar Wilde was a major originator of what is called the Decadent movement, a shift in late 19th-century artistic and literary analysis in Western Europe. This art style primarily flourished in France, but also influenced other areas of Europe - Oscar Wilde, for instance, was primarily responsible for the movement’s spread through England. Oscar Wilde, in all of his works, adhered to the ideas of the Decadents. He penned many articles, but his the bulk of his critical work were six essays, published over a period of five years and later compiled together. In this same year, Wilde also published his own novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which put into practice many of the aphorisms

This collective group was first referred to as “decadents” by hostile critics, as their work seemed to focus on unsavory and taboo topics. However, the Decadents later adopted the name for themselves, to separate themselves from other ideas of the time. Decadent philosophy overlapped greatly with the Aestheticism movement, but at the same time, they had several distinct ideas that set them apart. Overall, the Decadents extoled artifice over nature and complexity over simplicity, defying social norms by instead embracing subjects and styles that their critics considered morbid and over-refined. These writers, which included Wilde, Baudelaire, and others, used elaborate and stylized language even in their writings discussing such things as death, depression, and deviant sexualities. All in all, they aspired to set literature and art free from materialistic preoccupations of society, without any requirement of usefulness or attachment of moral messages to their work. They insisted that art should be made for art’s sake, and that art must be sensationalist or artificial to make an impact lest it blend

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.” (D.G, Wilde, 17). It seems absurd to declare a form that has been admired and practiced for centuries as “useless”. But the paradox in this statement plays on a cultural assumption: in this case, the presumed positive connection between usefulness and inherent value, especially with regard to art. He disagrees with the seemingly obvious truth that objects that are useful in life would also have more value than what is considered useless. Wilde’s defense, that “all art is quite useless,” in fact exposes the long-standing bias that art is not socially or morally “useful” and thus not valuable – or is only useful to the extent that it does serve society – and shifts the paradigm. In his writings and ideas, Wilde disassociates utility and value, and instead makes them opposites, so that what is ‘useful’ becomes something not to be “admired.” And art’s “uselessness” in turn becomes its essence, admired for its own existence and not because of any social of moral value it inherently