ABSTRACT
These words, spoken by a character in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), grant to a much maligned weed a status possibly higher than any it has known before or since, and may well strike the late-twentieth-century reader as rather strong. In representing the cigarette not only as a pleasure, but as the very quintessence of pleasure, they make the kind of exorbitant claim associated not so much with the refinement of aestheticism as with the advertisement’s ‘unique selling point’. It might seem natural to draw a distinction between aestheticism and advertising, identifying the latter with all the vulgarity rejected by the defenders of ‘art for art’s sake’. In this chapter, I shall draw on Wilde’s Picture and draw on the cigarette to try to show the relative convergence of the two, both as practices and as philosophies. The aesthete, far from being different from the new consumer of the period, turns out to be none other than his or her ‘perfect type’.2
