Eternal Dandyism

WHAT’S LEFT OF OSCAR WILDE?

Some will say not much. It was aristocratic like hell, it was witty like Hades, it was gross like Beelzebub. What’s left in our world where honor is a valueless stigma, if not stigmata, where greed is what everyone gargles every morning with, where sex is the funniest thing you can invent whereas love is a parody of the latest high porn free access flesh fornicating temptation.

But it sure is an illustration of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st century. And the latter is definitely graphic. So, let’s try to find something in these famous classics that are becoming more and more some cultish marginal clandestine culture.

OSCAR WILDE — THE UNCENSORED PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY — 2012

The main character is not so much Dorian Gray as Lord Henry Wotton. He is the one who manipulated the seventeen-year-old Dorian Gray as if he were a puppet-master playing with his puppet on its strings and rod, unseen and yet the one who provided society, meaning here the top elite of this society, with the daily gossip that can only entertain their idleness. Both Dorian Gray and Lord Henry…