The studio was filled with the pungent odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac…

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde linked art to beauty, meaning, thought and language—before deeming it ‘quite useless’. If this is true, and I wholeheartedly agree that most things are more useful to human society than art and its cousin, the humanities, then this blog, devoted to appreciating beauty and excellence of the artistic, literary, filmic and musical kind, is as beautiful and useless as a rose.

Walking around the rose garden by browsing its categories, you will also discover personal musings that grew out of sheer emotional excess, the kind that fuels creativity as well as retrospectively hilarious episodes of existential angst. Add angst to anxiety and you have a portrait of the artist as a young woman who is probably, at this moment, drinking gross amounts of coffee and fretting about how best to perfect every single item on her overly ambitious to-do list.

My name is Betty and I like to write and draw. When not doing the aforementioned, I can be found offering my soul to various indie bands, inspecting works of art with childlike wonderment, and reading books I wish I had written. Embarrassingly, I also enjoy turning my home into the sort of hipster heaven that demands carefully filtered photography, which you can find on my Instagram.

And for the record, I do not believe art is useless. Utility, if relevant, is merely its secondary function: its foremost aim is to record historical events and persons, convey meaning, offer sociopolitical commentary, provide cultural and personal insight, and, in the case of postmodernist (non)art, challenge, shock, parody, and subvert. All art is meaningful and any attempt to annihilate meaning is futile because every artwork is a text open to interpretation(s).

Look at this tangle of thorns.