By Looking At The Morals That Shine Through This Blog I Say Oscar Wilde Had Very Wrong Ideas

Mallory, good job on the "freaking us out with this crazy book" part. This is my take on the preface.  "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt....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."  I agree with him until he says "beautiful things mean only beauty." Is there nothing behind beauty?  "Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril." All we do in this class is read the symbols and pull things apart below the surface. Do symbols not represent something else? "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors" He says there is nothing below the surface and the spectator sees what he wants to see and if people talk differently about the art and argue about its meaning then the artist has "new, complex, and vital" work. Oscar Wilde is very idealistic. He thinks artist cannot prove anything and I agree to an extent. I believe that if an artist should try to write a story with the idea of "I am going to prove a point" in his head, then he will have a horrible story that in the end is just propaganda. Although if he just tells a story, his morals, which Oscar believes don't exist, automatically shine through his words if he means them to or not. "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he doesn't admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless" First we must define useless. In this case useless and useful come from utilitarianism where the idea is if it doesn't do anything then it is useless. If you can sit in a chair with no leather on it then the leather is useless. If art just sits on a wall then to Oscar Wilde it is quite useless and only beautiful, nothing beyond that, no morals just a picture.