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Editorial

Art & Soul

by Rick Lewis

“All art is quite useless.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Preface)

“The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.”
José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanisation of Art

Oscar Wilde’s remark about the uselessness of art is a typical Wilde thing – aphoristic, slightly paradoxical, and somehow expressing a weird kind of purity. It sounds as if he was trying to define art, and suggesting that anything useful is not art but a mere artifact. In this way he seems to be elevating art’s importance, placing it on a level above the merely utilitarian, turning it into a kind of goddess.

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