What is the role of an artist?

Should art deal only with Beauty or

should it also depict and discuss reality?
Do you agree with what he writes in the famous preface to The
Picture of Dorian Gray? Is art really useless?

Wilde thinks and writes that art should be freed from any purpose but the one of
portraying beauty, but is it really possible to detach art from every vulgar aspect of
reality?
In world history,” Art” has been always regarded as a tool in the hand of an artist that
he uses to invoke freedom and love, to make the whole society aware of its own
mistakes ( like Dickens).
However, to accomplish this task, the artist always represented the reality that
surrounded them to portray beauty. In fact, we can see that Dante Alighieri , to talk
about true love, tells us the tragic story of Paolo and Francesca who suffer together
the pain of hell. Moreover, to be transported in an imagined dimension , Leopardi
starts wondering from the vision of a hedge.
We can see how beauty always starts from the reality of our world , like the
romantics thought , and paraphrasing a famous song by the italian composer
Fabrizio De Andrè : “ from the diamonds nothing is born, from the manure the flowers
are born”.

Art has not always been synonymous with beauty, because beauty is something
totally depended of ourself thought and opinion.
You may think that also Art is something concerned only with taste and judgement,
but for me, it’s wrong to say so. Art is everything that creates emotion and feels, is
everything that makes you imagine beyond the surface of things. Art is all you want
to call art.
So, is art really useless?
In my personal opinion, of course it is not. Throughout history we have seen that Art
is fundamental for the human being, because it makes people conscious of the evil
that is a shadow following our lives ( Manzoni’s task in his works) and also to make
us account of the good and beauty that is present in our world.
Furthermore Art has always been a source of social redemption and a way to fight
pain and sadness.
Oscar Wilde said that art is useless, but are we sure that without art, today we would
ever heard of Oscar Wilde?