Beauty In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray

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Art and the pursuit of beauty are two of the primary driving forces of Oscar Wilde’s famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Art is aesthetically pleasing because it is essentially anything created predominantly for the purpose of being beautiful. Whether a painter, an actress, an orator, or even an opera singer, each artist in the novel is depicted as most beautiful when observed through their art. Reality, the shared apparently physical space in which all individual universes seem to be stranded, can be ugly because it can foster anything rationally conceivable. Under Wilde’s philosophy of aestheticism, one seeks moral pleasure from specifically artistic beauty rather than real life’s wide and polluted functionality. Beauty is both the noblest of pursuits and the singular artistic purpose, but it is far from the only pursuit in existence. Reality, because of its ability to withstand uses outside of beauty, is thus necessary despite being inferior to the purely beautiful world of art. However, if depicted by art, reality becomes purely beautiful and abandons its functionality. If this form of art returns to a focus on functionality, it will lose its artistic beauty. In The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde argues that art is a representation of its artist as pure beauty. However, …show more content…
Wilde succeeds in concluding both his original lecture on art as beautiful reality and his subsequent warning to people not to use their new artistic reality in the same way they used the old. With Dorian dead, the painting returns to its original beautiful state, and Dorian’s household staff find his real withered body unrecognizable because they never saw the painting and they never knew his soul. Dorian Gray was living as the surface of art without the symbol, and when he attacked the symbol, the symbol attacked in return and crushed the surface to

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