The text is a preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, novel by Oscar Wilde. It is made up of short statements that have an epigrammatic effect and they deal with the purposes of art, the role of the artist and the reader. 

The artist is the creator of beautiful things and the aim of the art is to hide the artist, so there is present the concept of impersonal art. So there is no more egocentrism of Romanticism.

 The critic is he who interprets and every form of criticism is a sort of autobiography. He distinguishes two kind of people: the corrupt who see ugly meanings in art, and the well-educated who see beautiful meanings. The word "Beauty" is one of the key words of Aesthetic Movement and the reader must find it in art.

Furthermore, there is no a moral or immoral book, what matter is how is it written. So there is a contrast with Victorian concept of literature.

Oscar Wilde also explain the reason why the nineteenth century refuses Realism and Romanticism using the image of Caliban, Shakespeare's character, that in first case see his own face in a mirror and in the second he does not.

There is no attention to morality, utility, education, ethics so in this way Oscar Wilde attacks Victorian concept of art. He also does not share the idea that everything had to be proved. Thought and language as instruments of the art reminds the objective correlative by T.S. Eliot.

There is also present Victorian dualism between vice and virtue that became material for an art. The art is surface and symbol together and its interpretation can be dangerous. In the same time a lot of interpretations suggest that the work is good.

The art mirrors the spectator not the life, so the role of the reader became very important, so art seems useless because it has not utilitarian and material value, so does not teach.