All art is quite useless.

The primary text I’ve chosen to work with this quarter is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, known outside of English departments as a disturbing image in the Art Institute of Chicago and an allusively metaphoric descriptor for everything from microbes to stock options. 

This blurb comes from the chapter “Monsters of Self-Destruction” in Barbara T. Gates’s Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories:

Like Tennyson's fictional Camelot, Wilde's portrait of fin de siècle England is of a land reeling back to the beasts, but with no hope for a second coming of a King Arthur to save it. The fantasy of Dorian Gray's portrait is not a Faustian story of a hero giving up life for knowledge, but a black fairy tale in which a spoiled boy gets his one wish — endless youthfulness and sensuality — and becomes a suicide because he cannot handle its implications. Wilde may have deserved the harsh criticism of his contemporaries, but like other Victorian creators of fictions and fantasies about monstrous selves who will to die, he discerned something deeply disturbing about his own culture. His Hallward, Dickens's Nell, Le Fanu's Jennings, Stevenson's Dr, Jekyll, and Tennyson's Balan all had "a little shadow that went along with them." That shadow was a dark, distorted other self, "a hideous hunchback," to use Matthew Arnold's paraphrase of Dr. Posey, "seated on [their] shoulders and which it was the main business of [their] lives to hate and oppose." (Arnold, 481) Often that subversive hunchback was beckoning them on toward death.