Christa Giles

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beauty, the idea of beauty became primarily a rhetorical
one. For as Wilde claimed in Gautier’s footsteps, art
expresses only itself; it creates its own definition of beauty.
And reality comes to depend on the nature of the art that
represents it. For this reason, the artist and his art control
our perception and, consequently, our moral constructs.
The labels ˝immoral,˝ ˝unintelligible,˝ ˝exotic,˝ ˝unhealthy,˝
and ˝morbid˝ are therefore, Wilde maintains, ridiculous
words to apply to a work of art. It is the ˝public who are all
morbid, because the public can never find expression for
anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses
everything.˝ 561
Thus an artist such as Beardsley resolves
˝pornography˝ into patterns of elegance undercut by the
whirling sinuous line. His drawings, insubstantial in black
and white, are like elaborate patterns over the void. His
excessive use of detail creates a sense of dissatisfaction, of
restlessness, a self-conscious drawing attention to its own
artifice. Deliberately provocative both in structure and
allusive parody of the individuals and manners of his own
day, the drawings exhibit excess within a formalized
structure. The work is quintessentially decadent in its
subject matter: yearning and desire. Desire is seen as good
in and of itself for, if it is satisfied, it leads to its own