ABSTRACT
Taking delight or pleasure in art means being prepared to learn from it. In the preface to his The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.” He meant that we can merely observe works of art, whether paintings, sculpture or literature, or we can imperil ourselves by trying to understand what it represents or stands for, and what it implies. He finished off by concluding: “All art is quite useless.”
