Summary
and
Analysis
Preface
Summary
Beautiful things are created by the artist. Art seeks to reveal art while concealing the artist. The critic converts artistic impressions into another medium. Autobiography is a sort of criticism. People who discover a negative meaning in something lovely are "corrupt without being appealing." Beautiful objects have beautiful significance for cultivated people. The elect are people who only find beauty in beautiful things. Books are neither moral nor immoral; they are just well or poorly written.
People who despise reality in the nineteenth century are like Caliban, who becomes outraged when he sees his own face in the mirror. People who despise romanticism in the nineteenth century are like Caliban, who is outraged by not seeing himself in the mirror.
The moral lives of individuals is the topic of art, but moral art is beautifully developed art. Artists make no attempt to prove anything. Artists lack ethical sympathies, which is "an unpardonable mannerism of style." Because "the artist may convey everything," morbid subjects can be included in the subject matter of art. Thought and language are the artist's tools. The materials of art are vice and virtue. Music is the pinnacle of all arts in terms of form. Acting is the pinnacle of the arts in terms of emotion.
Surface and symbol are both present in art. Those who try to dig beyond the surface or read the symbols "do so at their own risk." Art imitates the spectator rather than life. When there is disagreement on a work of art, it is considered good.
“When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with him[/her]self.”
The worth of art is not found in its utility. Art is useless.
Notes
The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray is well-known as a sort of manifesto for the Aesthetic Movement in art and literature. It is made up of a succession of aphorisms or epigrams (short sayings) that affirm the notions of art for the sake of art. Many of these aphorisms served as the foundation for not only Aesthetic literature, but also Modernist writing, which peaked in the 1920s. In the eighteenth century, art was thought to be valuable for moral training. It was designed to reflect life while also teaching its readers how to live a good and moral life.
Oscar Wilde disagrees with this interpretation of art. For Wilde, art was valuable in and of itself, not for its utility in other areas. Even for readers in the late twentieth century, his statements regarding art appear weird and out of place. People frequently interpret them as a hilarious overstatement of principles. However, each of the statements is completely consistent with the Aesthetes' thinking. They are not always exaggerations. Wilde was a staunch supporter of art's autonomy, or its independence from monetary worth.
