Calling Oscar Wilde's philosophy of art his ""most elusive legacy"", Julia Prewitt Brown attempts to define Wilde's conceptions of what art is and what it is not, of what the experience of art means in the modern world, and of the contradictory relations between the work of art and the sphere of the ethical everyday. She traces the experimental character of Wilde's thought from its resonance in his own life through its development within the tradition of aesthetic philosophy, ultimately focusing on his sense of the equivocal and diminishing presence of art in the postindustrial world.