Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

 I was sitting here feeling quite pleased that I finally, thanks to Nick, had access to the blog after many long weeks and I was musing over the final projects. One of my favourite novels on the face of the earth is The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde along with Frankenstein and Dracula. However, what just struck me was that The Picture of Dorian Gray has a completely beautiful opening to it about art. I only thought of this because I was musing over the exercise we did in class on Thursday of writing from the different perspectives within each our short stories. Harley, Kara, Terri and I each wrote from a different perspective and each created very different monologues, each of which were extremely inspiring and really helped launch us into a direction. Harley wrote front he perspective of the art and created an incredibly haunting monologue about possession and the desire of the art. In our rehearsal after class we started talking about the role of the art and I have, in this moment, remembered this preface by Oscar Wilde about art. I hope this preface will help my group and inspire others as much as it inspired me.

The Preface

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he whole can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

          The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass.

The nineteenth century dislike for Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

  Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

       When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.