The Aesthetic Movement

Wilde led the Aesthetic Movement, which proclaimed "art for art's sake" — the idea that beauty needs no moral justification. Dorian Gray is both an expression of this philosophy and its sharpest critique.

The novel argues that aestheticism without ethics produces monsters, yet that moralistic art produces tedium. Wilde moves between these positions with characteristic brilliance, siding fully with neither. His prose proves the point: sentences so beautiful they seduce you into accepting ideas that, on reflection, are deeply disturbing. The style is the argument — and the argument is that style alone is never enough.