The Picture of Dorian Gray: art for art's sake?
The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘All art is quite useless’
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel obsessed with the idea of art, and its power over us. How much power does art inherently have? How much power do we afford art? How does art have power over our lives and identities? And then in turn, what does The Picture of Dorian Gray tell us about art? These are questions I fear are too wide, too vague, and too unanswerable to tackle in one post. Oscar Wilde’s preface to his novel tells us plenty about art, but in the end leaves us as confused as ever, as if the whole point is that there is no clear lesson to be taken from art. I think I’d agree with that. If art had only one concrete lesson to teach us, we wouldn’t give it the time of day. But instead, here we are.
The preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray is utterly captivating, and utterly confusing. The apparent uselessness and insufficiencies of art are made abundantly clear in the preface, and those ideas are carried through into the novel, but why write a preface that renders art to be essentially useless, fanciful nonsense only to follow it up with an astoundingly brilliant novel? And in that novel we see a careful balancing act, a tension between ideas of art’s untruthfulness and its candour, its depth of meaning and its purely aesthetic value.
So then how do we assess the confusing, contradicting, even callous aphorisms that make up the novel’s preface in relation to the equally complex novel which follows? Surely we can’t dismiss it entirely, and we can’t cherry-pick the aspects we agree with and discard those we don’t. Is there a particular methodology we can use to make sense of it all? Instinct tells me Oscar Wilde would be horrifically offended by the suggestion that we might approach his novel with apparently scientific precision and rigidity. I’d have to agree; not just for his particular novel but for any novel - such a rigid approach does not seem appropriate.
What we do know is that The Picture of Dorian Gray is concerned with not merely a picture but a story. The picture holds not only the image of a man as an object, but the story of his moral decay, the many years of ageing and sin, the truth of himself that he refuses to share with the world. And indeed, one of the many things we might learn about art is that art encourages us to explore something in ourselves we might not have otherwise been prompted to pay attention to. As far as The Picture of Dorian Gray is concerned, art absolutely does imitate life.
There’s also an element of obsession that Dorian Gray develops around this portrait, and I wonder if in that relationship Wilde suggests that the art we are drawn to reveals something of ourselves. But there’s also something about that obsession that feels familiar. It’s not the kind of obsession that is belongs to a mind that we cannot ever understand, it’s the kind of obsession born out of a fascination, from having seen something that we profoundly understand but cannot make sense of.
It’s the kind of obsession I think many of us share; we see something that we understand in some way, that makes sense in some way, that perhaps represents us, but we either haven’t the words to express what it is we see, or we want more of that feeling, and so we seek it out in more art, in other forms. Dorian Gray sees himself (literally) in the portrait, and is drawn to his own perfection, but as the story develops and his vices and sins multiply, he is drawn to his degradation on the canvas as much as he was initially drawn to his apparent perfection. What Dorian Gray seeks desperately to understand, to become closer to, and yet cannot understand, and is increasingly repulsed by, is himself.
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