All art is quite useless.

Host: The museum had closed an hour ago, but the security guard, bored and half asleep, didn’t notice the two figures still lingering in the marble hall. The lights had dimmed to a soft, golden hum — reflections rippled across glass cases and bronze sculptures. The air smelled of dust, varnish, and silence.

Jack stood before a painting — a vast canvas of nothing but color: bleeding shades of blue melting into gray. He stared at it with the detached fascination of a surgeon examining an organ. Jeeny stood a few steps behind, her arms crossed, her eyes glimmering with quiet awe.

Between them, the painting pulsed — a still ocean, a question in pigment form.

Jeeny’s voice broke the silence:

“All art is quite useless.” — Oscar Wilde.

Her tone was gentle, almost reverent — like reciting scripture in a forgotten chapel.

Jack chuckled under his breath.

Jack: “Finally, someone honest. Wilde said what every artist secretly knows — it’s all vanity dressed in genius.”

Jeeny: “You think beauty’s vanity?”

Jack: “I think it’s distraction. Paintings, music, poetry — all of it keeps us from facing the absurdity of life. Art is anesthesia for the intelligent.”

Jeeny: “Or oxygen for the suffocating.”

Host: The light flickered slightly. Somewhere in the distance, a door creaked. The sound of the empty museum — solemn, infinite — wrapped around them like velvet.

Jack: “You can’t eat art, Jeeny. You can’t cure disease with a sonnet or rebuild a city with a sculpture. It’s useless, exactly as Wilde said.”

Jeeny: “And yet people die for it.”

Jack: turning toward her “They die for ideas, not art.”

Jeeny: “Art is what ideas look like when they remember they have a heart.”

Jack: “You romanticize everything.”

Jeeny: “And you drain color from everything.”

Host: The painting loomed larger in the dim light — as if listening. The floor beneath them gleamed with faint reflections of blue, like a shallow pool of sky had spilled across the marble.

Jeeny: “You know why Wilde said that, don’t you? Because he wanted to provoke the world that kept asking art to justify itself. He was mocking the need for purpose.”

Jack: “No, he meant it. Wilde was too clever for sentiment. He believed beauty existed for its own sake — useless because it didn’t serve.”

Jeeny: “Then maybe uselessness is the point. Maybe it’s what saves us. Everything useful becomes corrupted — politics, science, even love. Art’s the only thing left that doesn’t have to earn its existence.”

Jack: “So it just exists… like luxury.”

Jeeny: “No. Like truth.”

Host: Jack’s eyes flicked toward the next room — dark, lined with portraits. He spoke like a man trying not to believe the thing that had already convinced him.

Jack: “Truth without consequence is indulgence.”

Jeeny: “And consequence without beauty is despair.”

Host: The rain began outside, faint at first, then steady — its sound echoing through the museum’s domed ceiling like distant applause.

Jeeny walked closer to the painting. Her fingers hovered just above the canvas, trembling slightly.

Jeeny: “Do you remember the day the cathedral burned? People wept watching wood and glass collapse. That wasn’t for religion, Jack. It was for beauty. For something useless that made them feel human.”

Jack: “Or nostalgic. People cry for what they think they’ve lost, not what they’ve loved.”

Jeeny: “You really believe art is that hollow?”

Jack: “No. I think it’s the most magnificent emptiness we’ve created. A mirror for meaning we can’t find anywhere else.”

Jeeny: “Then maybe that’s not emptiness — maybe it’s mercy. The universe speaks chaos; art translates it into something we can bear.”

Host: Her voice carried softly through the cavernous space, echoing off marble and canvas. The air seemed to hold its breath.

Jack: “You think a painting can save someone?”

Jeeny: “I think it already has.”

Jack: “Who?”

Jeeny: “Me.”

Host: Silence again — this time deeper. The rain thickened, a thousand tiny hands drumming against the skylight. Jack looked at her, and something behind his eyes shifted — the faint ache of recognition.

Jack: “You really believe that?”

Jeeny: “Yes. Art gave me a place to put what words couldn’t carry.”

Jack: “Pain?”

Jeeny: “And joy. And guilt. And all the things the world tells you to forget.”

Jack: “So it’s therapy.”

Jeeny: “No, Jack. It’s memory — that refuses to die quietly.”

Host: Jack took a step closer, the distance between them now barely the width of the canvas. He studied her — not the painting — her eyes, the glint of conviction there.

Jack: “Then tell me this. If art is so necessary, why do the poorest cities have the richest souls? Why do the children with nothing still laugh without paintings on their walls?”

Jeeny: “Because art isn’t on walls, Jack. It’s in the laughter. It’s in the survival. It’s in the way they still dance when the world gives them no music.”

Jack: “So you’re saying life itself is art?”

Jeeny: “I’m saying life is useless, too — and that’s what makes it beautiful.”

Host: The rain softened again, leaving behind the hush of a thousand tiny echoes. The lights dimmed further.

Jeeny stepped back, looking once more at the painting — the endless ocean of blue.

Jeeny: “Wilde wasn’t wrong, you know. All art is useless. But so is breathing, if you think about it long enough.”

Jack: “Breathing keeps you alive.”

Jeeny: “And art reminds you why that matters.”

Host: The clock above the entrance ticked softly — each second folding into the next like brushstrokes of time.

Jack smiled — not with irony this time, but with something almost like surrender.

Jack: “You know what’s strange? For something useless, it’s hard to look away.”

Jeeny: smiling faintly “That’s because it’s not meant to be looked at. It’s meant to be felt.”

Jack: “Then maybe I’m feeling it now.”

Jeeny: “Good. That means you’re still human.”

Host: They stood there, side by side, in the cathedral of silence that only art can build — the kind made of stillness and ache and the faint hum of something sacred.

Outside, the city lights blurred into the rain. The museum slept, but inside it, two souls stood awake — one who doubted, one who believed — both quietly astonished by how something so useless could make the world feel alive again.

The camera would have pulled back then — slowly — revealing them small against the vast expanse of painted color, framed by darkness and echo and time.

And in that vastness, Wilde’s words no longer sounded like mockery, but prophecy:
that what is most useless is often what saves us —
because it asks nothing,
and yet gives everything.