{"id":3317,"date":"2026-08-08T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:8899\/all-art-is-quite-useless-wilde\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T09:30:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T09:30:00","slug":"all-art-is-quite-useless-wilde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/all-art-is-quite-useless-wilde\/","title":{"rendered":"All Art Is Quite Useless"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wilde added the preface to <em>The Picture of Dorian Gray<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oscar Wilde ended his preface to Dorian Gray with a provocation that still reads as a defence. What did he mean by useless, and why does it sound like praise?<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":"","_adesa_post_subtitle":"Oscar Wilde ended his preface to Dorian Gray with a provocation that still reads as a defence. What did he mean by useless, and why does it sound like praise?","_adesa_featured_post":false,"_adesa_single_summary":"Wilde wrote the preface after critics called Dorian Gray immoral. Its last line is less a shrug than a boundary: a work of art owes nothing to the uses we find for it.","_adesa_single_key_points":null,"_adesa_read_also":null,"_adesa_gallery_images":"","_adesa_video_file":"","_adesa_video_url":"","_adesa_video_poster":"","_adesa_audio_file":"","_adesa_audio_url":"","_adesa_quote_text":"All art is quite useless.","_adesa_quote_cite":"Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)","_adesa_link_url":"","_adesa_link_label":"","_jkd_coauthors":"","_jkd_coauthors_hide_primary":false},"categories":[595],"tags":[1002,1003,1001],"class_list":["post-3317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literature","tag-aestheticism","tag-criticism","tag-oscar-wilde","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}