Make Good Use

My most recent reading in Manifesto: A Century of Isms was on the movement of Symbolism. The most controversial of the symbolist thinkers was Oscar Wilde, with the famed quote "All art is quite useless." I have to unpack this loaded statement and try to understand the Symbolist Mind.
Wilde, along with other symbolist thinkers, place art with a capital "a" on a pedestal, saying--as James Abbott McNeill Whistler did in The Ten O'clock--that art "is a goddess of dainty thought—reticent of habit, adjuring of obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach."
As Wilde contests, art cannot be moral or immoral, no matter what the moral intention of its creator.
This idea of art as a useless goddess we must pay homage to is an unhealthy idea of symbolism. Art is in fact very useful. No, you cannot brush your teeth with art, you cannot cure a cold, but what can you say of other abstracted things such as beauty or emotion?
The pragmatic man--and apparently the symbolist man--would cast aside these ideals because they waste time. However, this is not Hard Times, and if it were, the point would be proved that there must be room for fancy, for if there is not, what joy can a child have?
Without things such as beauty, man would be miserable. There would be no joy in work or leisure. Art is a vehicle of beauty, and therefore is very useful. Without these unpalpable things that keep us vivfied, sanity would be a thing of the past.
Art grounds us to reality through its interpretation of the world around us; rather, to break from the symbolist idea of Art, the artist grounds us to reality through his or her interpretation of the world around us.