Wilde added the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray after the magazine version drew a storm of reviews calling it poisonous and unclean. He answered with twenty-odd aphorisms, and he saved the shortest for last.
Useless here is not an insult. A chair is useful because it serves something outside itself; a painting, for Wilde, serves nothing but its own pattern. To ask a novel for a lesson is to treat it like furniture.
A reader who wrote to him asking what the line meant got a patient reply: a work of art is useless as a flower is useless. It exists to be looked at. That is the whole of its task, and it is enough.
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