Oscar Wilde pursued a life -- an art -- of pure uselessness. This was not because he objected to pragmatic pursuits, if kept in their proper place: "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it inten

Aestheticist fiction, Clever, Mythic, Perverse, Surreal, Witty

Arthur Rimbaud made his way through language like some crazed channeler of unseen forces. As a Symbolist poet, Rimbaud scrambled the senses and his prose, forging a synesthetic wash of words sustained by their own momentum and internal sense. There is no clear form (he did not write sonnets); there's

Anxiety, Dark, Dissonant, Overflowing, Pathos, Surreal, Symbolist poetry

"Windows are the great unsung heroes of image communication: They are 3-D billboards bolted to the front of your store." In the early '80s, Simon Doonan changed our concept of "window shopping." Part elaborate artistic creation, part unbridled sales promotion, Doonan's windows heralded a new phase of

Glamour, Ironic, Pop, Quirky, Surreal

In 1991, Matthew Barney exploded onto the New York art scene with all the force of his often insanely physical videos. Just eight years later, a New York Times article dared to crown him "the most important artist of his generation." The occasion was the release of "Cremaster," one of a cycle of five

Epic, Perverse, Quirky, Surreal