15 Art for Art’s Sake

Dr. Valiur Rehman

Objectives

This module defines and characterizes the decadent literary movement and the critical school called Art for Art’s Sake or Aestheticism. It includes a brief literature review, etymology, genesis, and practitioners of Art for Art’s Sake along with their distinct principles and critical reception before 1960 and after.

Introduction

Art for Art’s Sake is a slogan of the literary movement Aestheticism developed in the Decadent period. The opening verse lines of John Keats’s Endymion, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever / Its loveliness increases / it will never / Pass into nothingness” epitomize the principles represented through the slogan. Keats, therefore, is regarded as progenitor of Aestheticism.

The major pronouncement of Literature produced under the impact of Art for Art’s Sake is that Literature reveals the power of beauty and taste before its readers and audiences. Art for Art’s Sake is the trans-creation of l’art pour l’art, which has expounded the tenets of the Aestheticism. Thus, Art for Art’s Sake and Aestheticism has similar salient features as literary movements. Literally, Aestheticism is concerned with ‘a set of principles, the nature, and appreciation of beauty’ (COED 11th Edition). There are authors and artists who consciously have elevated the art to a position of supreme importance and to an autonomous sphere. Such artists or authors are the Aesthetes. They believe that the art has no social function. They attempt to separate artistry from life-description. The works of Théophile Gautier (1811-72) and his followers in France; the works of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and his followers in the America; and the works of Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) and his followers in England expounded the Art for Art’s Sake as the literary movement.

J. E. Spingarn’s essay “Art for Art’s Sake: A Query” (1907) reports that the term Art for Art’s Sake is found in Thackeray’s letter written in 1839: “Please God we shall begin, ere long, to love art for art’s sake” (Chapter From Some Memoirs 1895). However, the literary historians think that the outset of Art for Art’s Sake is firstly observed in Victor Cousin’s series of lectures delivered in 1818, which was published later, entitled Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good (1854). Cousin mentions in the lecture:

We must have religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for art’s sake . . . the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself. (Quoted in Stephen Davies et al. Companion to Aesthetics 129)

Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), in an essay “Saintsbury and Art for Art’s Sake in England” (1944) justifies Saintsbury as the follower of the Art for Art’s Sake and the English aesthetic critic. In this essay she epitomizes the objective of Art for Art’s Sake by illustrating one of Saintsbury’s statements (1895): “The whole end, aim, and object of literature … as of all art … is beauty” (Richardson). Albert Guérard in the essay “Art for Art’s Sake” has also defined it in terms of signifying Literature as the paramount object of beauty:

Art for Art’s Sake means Art Dominant, Life for the Sake of Art, life subordinated to the service of beauty, a pilgrimage to the Land of Esthetic Promise…Art for Art’s Sake is best revealed, not in the impalpably inane, but in clashes with reality. The evangel of Beauty refuses to submit to Science, Business, Morality, the three idols of the modern world.

Frank Kermode in Romantic Image (1957) discusses Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium” in terms of Baudelaire’s concept of artificial paradise and has defined Art for Art’s Sake as the act of self-forgotten artist. Kermode clarifies it saying:

The paradise in which labour and beauty are one, where beauty is self-begotten and costs nothing, is the artificial paradise of a poet deeply disturbed by the cost in labour … The artist himself may be imagined, therefore, a change-less thing of beauty, purged of shapelessness and commonness induced by labour, himself a self-begotten and self- delighting marble or bronze.

R. V. Johnson in Aestheticism (1969) has studied the aestheticism in three different applications:

• “as a view of art,” which applies for the core principle of the literary movement Art for Art’s Sake. It expresses that the art does not produce the effect of other reasons but of its own; and that the artistry makes an object a thing of beauty. Therefore, it is not the content or the subject matter but the art that sublimates a work of art. From this perspective, perhaps, Wilde in his “The Decay of Lying” (1889) has declared that lying is the proper aim of art. (The Artist as Critic 320)
• “as a practical tendency in literature” which applies on principle that the writer is an artist and he is not a propagandist. He is not a reporter of the lives. Frank Kermode also agrees: “Art for art’s sake is a derisory sentiment, yet questions of the morality of the work will usually be answered in terms of its perfection, not of its ‘message’.” (Kermode 195) In fact, this principle was a reaction stood against artistry for the bourgeois hedonism.
• “as a view of life” for which Johnson has used “contemplative aestheticism” which refers to the art of treating the artist’s experience to represent life through elevated spirit of art that produces the aesthetic enjoyment (p 12). The artist or the writer must have the capacity to beautify his or her experience in such a manner that an experience of light incident can influence the mind of the audience. Poe’s poem, “The Bells” posthumously published in 1849 is a fine example of onomatopoetic artistry. A diacope, or repetition and reverberation of a word “bell” evoke sentiments in the reader.

Development of Art for Art’s Sake 

Art for Art’s Sake has its classical root in Alexandrian men of letters; its philosophical root in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s concept of ‘aesthetics’; and its expansion in Kantian philosophy of beauty and taste. The eclectic philosopher of France, Victor Cousin was the first one to introduce l’art pour l’art to literature. The French symbolist poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) as an aesthete influenced Walter Pater whom Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) had followed throughout his life and brought out the Aesthetic movement by advocating literature across the dichotomy of good and evil. The notorious words of Walter Pater, “The office of the poet is not that of a moralist” (Pater 1986, 427) echoed in the works of Oscar Wilde. Megan Becker-Leckrone in Julian Wolfreys’s edited book, Modern British and Irish Criticism and Theory writes in this regards, “Like Pater’s, Wilde’s concept of aesthetic autonomy belongs to and raises the stakes of this intellectual current. If art does not primarily ‘copy’ life or nature, then what does it do? Wilde’s provocative response to this question at once severs and reverses this mimetic relationship, proposing instead that ‘Life imitates Art’” (2006, 18). Thus, Walter Pater typified the Art for Art’s Sake as literary movement called Aestheticism in England while Oscar Wilde strengthened it and culminated in it.

Aesthetics is an umbrella term. It has many facets, and multicolored rib tips like aesthetics of action, aesthetics of imitation, aesthetics of imagination, aesthetics of taste, aesthetics of existence and violence etc. etc. For example, Plato’s theory of ‘imitation’ and his paradigm of the cave explore the aesthetics of the composition of Truth. Aristotle’s theory of ‘imitation’ and ‘action’ explore the aesthetics of the catharsis. Plotinus’s theory of esoteric wisdom explores the aesthetics of insulatory description of beauty, and power of the beauty to elevate man from his state of thought to the contemplation of the universe. Thus, Aesthetics as discipline, which studies the nature and appreciation of beauty, may have many dimensions to appreciate the artistic beauty whereas Aesthetic (word without /s/) is used for the literary movement emerged in the Decadent period. Aesthetic movement sublimated art as pure reason and beauty of human existence. The works, written under the impact of the Decadent literary movement, have exemplified the elements of Art for Art’s Sake.

The ideal of Art for Art’s Sake is observed in the work of four of the ablest Alexandrian men of letters who worked as librarians of the famous ancient library—Library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I, the king of Egypt in 3rd BC – Zenodotus, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus. “All four approached literary texts as aesthetic experiences to be enjoyed; they show little interest in moralizing or allegorizing, and their one concern was with the integrity of the text.” (Kennedy 205) Nevertheless, Aesthetics could not be popularized as a discipline or a school of thought, nor could even develop the believe: ‘art lives for herself’.

The German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, in his dissertation “Philosophical Considerations of Some Matters Pertaining to the Poem” (1714-68) introduced the term aesthetics in 1835 to mean “a science of how things are to be known by means of the senses.” Four years later, Baumgarten had extrapolated that definition in Metaphysica adding the “logic of the lower cognitive faculty, the philosophy of the graces and the muses, lower gnoseology, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analog of reason.” Another decade later, Baumgarten delivered some lectures on aesthetics in Frankfurt in 1742. His Aesthetica (1750- 58), a monumental fragment, contains these lectures. It was the first treatise published under the title of the new subject. He combined his two previous definitions to form his final definition of the subject: “Aesthetics (the theory of the liberal arts, lower gnoseology, the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analog of reason) is the science of sensitive cognition” He would appreciated ‘form’ as an important element of the beautiful work of art.

Since the Art for Art’s Sake is primarily concerned with taste and beauty, Emanuel Kant’s Critique for Judgment (1790) has its philosophic root. Kant revived A.G. Baumgarten’s term ‘aesthetics’ and experienced art as a sufficient entity of the universe. He considered aesthetics as the realm of disinterested pleasure. It pleases for its own sake. The source of pleasure is the taste of beauty. Victor Cousin elucidated Kant referentially and applied his philosophy of Taste and Beauty as an approach to understanding the art. Theophile Gautier (1811-72) wrote a ‘Preface’ to his novel Mademoiselle du Maupin (1836), formulated the classic expression of one extreme pole in the debate declaring the categorical independence of l’art pour l’art, or the art for art’s sake. Art, in Gautier’s view, is wholly opposed to utility and life.

The American poet Edger Allen Poe’s “The Poetic Principle” (1850) argues for the role and the power of beauty in the composition of the poetry:

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.

… pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the heart (“The Poetic Principle”)

This definition of poetry implies poetic autonomy –the poetry does not have any concern with things other than beauty and ‘taste of beauty” which function to elevate reader’s consciousness. The German philosopher Schopenhauer, the French Gautier and American Poe influenced Charles-Pierre Baudelaire’s anti-idealist vision of art and poetry. Baudelaire encouraged symbolist movements. He wrote about the ugliest subjects in the most beautiful manner. He as an aesthetician emphasised on two things: poetic automaton and imagination. But his theory of imagination, unlike Romanticists, refers to the creative faculty of the individual which capacitates him to grasp everything as ‘hieroglyphic’(Paris Spleen & La Fanfarlo, 2008, xxvi). Romantics worshipped nature for her nurseling and nourishing power. The Nature is an inspiring force for the poets of romantic imagination whereas Baudelaire as aesthete looks at Nature as a ‘pitiless enchantress’:

And now the depth of the sky troubles me; its limpidity exasperates me. The indifference of the sea, the immutability of the scene repulses me . . . Oh, must one either suffer eternally, or eternally flee the beautiful? Nature, you pitiless enchantress, you always victorious rival, leave me alone! Stop arousing my desires and my pride! The study of the beautiful is a duel, one that ends with the artist crying out in terror before being vanquished. (“The Artist’s Confiteor” in Paris Spleen & La Fanfarlo 7)

In his “Salon” (1859), he states that “imagination is the queen of truth … affects all the other faculties; it rouses them, it sends them into combat … It is analysis, it is synthesis … It is imagination that has taught man the moral meaning of color, of outline, of sound, and of perfume.” Baudelaire thinks Poe as a true poet who believed that poetry should have no object in view other than itself. He had firm faith that a man of imagination can beautifully write about the ugliest of human life. In his words:

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of food which the imagination must digest and transform. All the powers of the human soul must be subordinated to the imagination, which commandeers them all at one and the same time.

Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857) became the subject of a trial for obscenity in the same year for including some lesbian poems. He never takes care of subjects – high or low, as Shelley and Arnold has instructed to choose the “best thought” expressed with “high seriousness.” The French Symbolism remained an aesthetic movement caused by a reaction against romanticism, realism, and naturalism. Baudelaire, unlike Parnassian poets of France, followed Gautier for his emphasis on independent art as the highest form of human faculty:

It was to be an art not of mimesis but of expression, an art akin to music, that highest of all the arts according to Schopenhauer, and they reiterated Edgar Allan Poe’s statement, quoted by Baudelaire, that “it is in music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains … the creation of supernal beauty”.

Walton Litz et al remind us: “Gautier’s discussion would prompt the more probing reflections of Baudelaire in his celebrated essays on ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850) and ‘New Notes on Edgar Poe’ (1859), and the work of both authors would migrate across the English Channel to reappear in complex ways in the works of Ruskin, Pater, Swinburne, and Wilde.”

The English Aestheticism

We  have  discussed  A.  G.  Baumgarten’s  coinage  of  ‘aesthetics’  in  the  18th   century  and its subsequent exposition in Kant’s Critique of Judgment as the result of disinterested perception. When writers of the age of doubt i.e. Victorian era tended to signify the religious cause for the life upholding against geological hypotheses, Darwinism, destructive action of science, and material revolution; when Spencer’s idea of social reality, and Huxley’s disposition of relationship between science and society, an anti-realist and anti-bourgeois disposition was also taking place in the form of two literary movements: the Pre-Raphaelite and Aestheticism. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed in 1848 in England for signifying the moralized and serious art of the Middle Ages. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had ambition to reinvent the advent of the Renaissance artist Raphael and before Raphael while Aesthetic writers followed  the Parnassian poets of France inspired by Théophile Gautier and Leconte de Lisle (1818–1894), and adopted an ethic of “art for art’s sake”, and Baudelaire who was influenced by Gautier and Edgar Allan Poe’s theories of poetic composition. Since Aestheticism developed in 1889-90, it was a decadent event in the history of English literature and criticism. Its doctrines were reverberated through the aesthetics of Kant, many of the Romantics, the French Parnassians, the Pre-Raphaelites, the symbolists, the decadents, and the critical programs of the twentieth-century formalists, yet remained unique and known for its singular characteristic i.e. the work of art has no  other  function  than  to  be  a  work  of  art.  Aestheticians  of  Decadence  denied  the social, religious, cathartic and moral function of art. They seem very experimental in approaches to opting subjects for artistic representation. Their dispositions maybe enumerated as:

• expression of artificial eroticism and sexual perversion.
• an intense self-consciousness of authorship,
• development of a restless curiosity in research and innovative approaches to experience
• subtilising refinement upon refinement
• a spiritual and moral perversity to the quest for a purity of experience and sensation.
• a disembodied voice, upholding the voice of a human soul
• a self-conscious experimental reflection of a perceived breakdown in social and cultural unity

Scottish essayist, historian and social critic, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and John Ruskin (1819-1900) English writer, art critic, and reformer, were among intellectuals of the Victorian period. Both praised beauty and its power to change the contemporary mindset. From this point of view, they are aestheticians as critics have conceded it. However, their inclination was to observe art in relation to its unavoidable function i.e. to moralize. Carlyle’s philosophical satire, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored), first published between 1833 and 1834 in Fraser’s Magazine, seems autobiographical, but it affirms his spiritual idealism. He, in the guise of a “philosophy of clothes,” comments on the hollowness of materialism. His On Heroes, Hero- Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) exemplifies Carlyle’s thought about the power of art and literature.

John Ruskin is popular literary figure for his monumental studies of architecture and its social and historical significance. His The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), its sequel, The Stones of Venice (1851), and the first volume of Modern Painters (1843-60) carried on the theme of relationship between art and morality. His idea of “Pathetic Fallacy,” pronounces the power of artist who can incarnate the sensation of living being in the non-living thing. The “Pathetic Fallacy” exemplifies one of the ethics of Art for Art’s Sake, yet Ruskin has maintained that art is nothing without its moral function.

Aestheticism of decadent period, as we have discussed earlier in this essay, advocates for the art minus its classical functions: to moralize, to reflect society, to imitate life, to propagate the truth etc. Walter Pater and his disciple Oscar Wilde brought forth this idea to the British culture of letters.

The English essayist and critic Walter Pater (1839-1894) developed British Aesthetic. He treats art for its pleasurable effects on reader. He explains that art should never be didactic, hortatory, religious, political, and practical. He introduced the French decadents, aesthetes, and symbolists to the English society. He followed Gautier and Baudelaire for their emphasis on the perfection of art and its self-sufficiency. For Pater, a word may include everything of which poetry is born. A unit of sound may present the whole meaning. A.C. Bradley in “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake” says, “What is the gist of Pater’s teaching about style, if it is not that in the end the one virtue of style is truth or adequacy; that the word, phrase, sentence, should express perfectly the writer’s perception, feeling, image, or thought.”

Pater concludes Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) saying that art gives pleasure for its own sake. He declares, “art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.’ His novel Marius the Epicurean (1885) is about the “sensations and ideas” of a young 2nd-century Roman confronting Christianity. His Appreciations: with an Essay on Style (1889) is the exposition of the Romantic works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles Lamb. His autobiographical The Child in the House (1894) contains sketches of Pater’s early years. In all these works, Pater has shown his interest for knowing the power of artistry. He appreciated Wordsworthian imagination and its power to sketch the abstract.

Walter Pater influenced his younger contemporary Irish-born writer Oscar Wilde. Wilde professes that art is far more than a mere imitation of nature. “A Truth in Art,” he remarks in “The Truth of Masks” (1891), “is that whose contradictory is also true”. In “The Decay of Lying” he declares that ‘art never expresses anything but art itself…” and that “the telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art.” His fiction The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) presents the theme that the artistry is beyond the dichotomies like good and bad. It exists beyond the art and morality; ethics and aesthetics. In preface to this fiction Wilde upheld, “All art is  quite useless.” Homosexual Wilde’s most influential tragedy Salome presents bizarre desire and its repulsion. It rests on hermaphroditic notions. Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas translated Salome, originally written in French, later into English in 1894. It alludes to the Bible account of the death of John the Baptist and to Flaubert’s story Herodias. The play was produced in 1931 in England. The striking unethical and unsocial theme of death and orgasm approves Pater’s anti- idealist dictum that art knows nothing but art itself. Beardsley’s penchant for drawing hermaphrodite figures caused particular offence. (Bermúdez and Sebastian 127) This book represents the poetics of painting for “not the thing but the effect it produces” (Mallarmé. Correspondance, 1862–1871, 1959; 137)

Wilde as Art for Art’s Sake critic defines criticism in terms of creativity akin to the creativity of an artist. Criticism, for Wilde, is itself an art. His book Intentions (1891) a collection of critical essays, justifies him as a critic. These essays, entitled “The Decay of Lying”, “The Critic as Artist”, “Pen, Pencil and Poison”, “The Truth of Masks”, “Portrait of Mr. W. H.” and “The Soul of Man” represent his philosophy of works of art. In these essays, he seems to defend art as a  free phenomenon and its handler, the artist as a free individual. As he thinks that “the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational …” and that, “… the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there’. Such criticism ‘treats the work of art simply as a starting point for a new creation”. Criticism is ‘the purest form of personal expression”. Thus, Wilde thinks about criticism as restorer of beauty, taste, culture and that which an artist forgets to create in his creation.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), American painter and etcher, followed Japanese  art styles, made technical innovations, and championed modern art. Many regard him as preeminent among etchers. His freelancing style of etching was not based on ideas of the society, problems of the politics or the nation but on the paramount vision of artistry. He had power to turn the classic into the avant-guard. He was an experimental user of erotic visual imageries. Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) is not familiar as a literary writer but an English visual artist. He was a fin-de-siècle sensitive young man associated with the Aestheticism. In his short life span (his productive career spanned only six years, died of TB at 25), Beardsley won fame for his epicene drawings. He was inspired of 19th century Aestheticians of France, Japanese printmakers and the pre-Raphaelite painters. His illustrations of erotic fantasy aroused a great controversy.  He was the art editor of a periodical The Yellow Book (1894-1895) and of The Savoy (1896); both of these publications envisage his works. He illustrated well known aestheticians of the world: editions of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1469-1470; 1893-1894); Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1894); The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1894-1895); Aristophanes’s Lysistrata (411 BC; 1896); and Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606; 1898). His posthumously published Under the Hill (1904) contains the designed posters, wrote fiction, and poetry. They are remarkable for experimental visual art detached from moral purposes.

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945), the English literary critic and poet, was born in Wales and educated privately. Frank Kermode called him “sinister figure, a successful but dispassionate womanizer, and a secret homosexual” (Forms of Attention 7). As an aesthete Symons defines the job of the artist, “The artist who is above all things an artist cultivates a little choice corner of himself with elaborate care; he brings miraculous flowers to growth there, but the rest of the garden is but mown grass or tangled bushes” (Symbolist Movements 65) . Symons’s essay “The Decadent Movement in Art and Literature” published in Harpers Monthly Magazine in November 1893 characterizes the decadent style as a vision of tortured syntax, preciosity and linguistic experimentation for its own sake. He was a great admirer of the French symbolist poets, and he expounded their ideas in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) and Charles Baudelaire (1920). In his poems collected in Days and Nights (1889) and Silhouettes (1892), he has practiced the subjective, emotional symbolist style. His The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (1909), Studies in the Elizabethan Drama (1920), and the autobiographical Confessions (1930) established him as critic of the decadent period. These critical stances rest on his idea of imperceptible capacities of the creative authors. In The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), he praised the abnormal experimentation of the poets (esp. of symbolists). His experimental images and artistry shown in London Nights met with a torrent of abuse. Symons characterizes the Decadent sensibility in relation to the aim of aestheticism:

It is typical of a civilisation grown over-luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct. It reflects all the moods, all the manners of a sophisticated society; its very artificiality is a way of being true to nature; simplicity, sanity, proportion – the classic qualities – how much do we possess them in our life, our surroundings, that we should look to find them in our literature – so evidently the literature of a decadence. (Quoted in “The Concept of Decadence” Art and Morality 118)

Symons praised the madness of Gerard de Nerval, a pseudonym of G. Labrunie (1808-55), as the visionary character of creative artists. He says, “we owe to the fortunate accident of madness one of the foundations of what may be called the practical aesthetics of Symbolism.” (50) Symons appreciated Villiers for the unpopularity of his work. He thinks that he “has no pathos… his mind is too abstract to contain pity, and it is in his lack of pity that he seems to put himself outside humanity.” He described Rimbound’s unique quality for ‘his mind was not the mind of the artist but of the man of action. He was a dreamer, but all his dreams were discoveries. He is a man with “the spilt wisdom of the drunkard.”

Critical Reception of “Art for Art’s Sake” or Aestheticism

The writers and artists who believe in the morality, fanaticism, responsibility of authors as social activists, propagandist, and as men of social values, they will never appreciate the doctrines of Art for Art’s Sake. The reason is that it emphasizes on the significance of the power of artistry manifested in Art; and that it inspires the artist to make a trivial thing the elevated. Art for Art’s Sake teaches the artist how to make the heinous or the repulsive desire the attractive, how to manifest the bizarre or immoral things which seems devastative to human life in the most beautiful manner. It opposes to all instrumentalist theories of art. For example, Henry James condemns Gautier’s preface and criticized Baudelaire calling him a mere sensationalist. In “Gustave Flaubert,” he disapproved the principles of “art for art” for its detachment from morality and the responsibility of an artist i.e. to expose the inner or outer reality of human life. Its creed seemed to him to exhibit “a most injurious disbelief in the illimitable alchemy of art.” 

Thomas Stearns Eliot suggests, in “Experiment in Criticism” (1929), to read the English classics from instrumentalist points of view, and to assess the greatness of the art in literature. He epitomizes Art for Art’s Sake:

If you read carefully the famous epilogue in Pater’s Studies in the Renaissance you will see that ‘art for art’s sake’ means nothing less than art as a substitute for everything else, and as a purveyor of emotions and sensations which belong to life rather than to art … I think we should return again and again to the critical writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to remind ourselves of that simple truth that literature is primarily literature, a means of refined and intellectual pleasure.

One year later, in “Arnold and Pater” (1930) collected in Selected Essays (1932; 1951-2) Eliot justifies ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ as an offspring of the moral visions and literary culture of Arnold, Carlyle and Ruskin. He discards the charges made against Pater’s Renaissance and defied to concede Pater’s connection with the discourse of his contemporary Art for Art’s Sake. He also thinks about ‘art for art’s sake’ as failure practice because it is fruitless for the audience.

The theory (if it can be called a theory) of ‘art for art’s sake’ is still valid in so far as it can be taken as an exhortation to the artist to stick to rules job; it never was and never can be valid for the spectator, reader or auditor.

Saintsbury praised the courage to artifice the new subject in the most beautiful manner. He says in 1895 “The whole end, aim, and object of literature … as of all art … is beauty.” (Richardson, Saintsbury and Art for Art’s Sake in England)

Art for Art’s Sake After 1960 

Michel Foucault, referentially, denies art for art’s sake thought. He talks of ‘aesthetics of existence’ ‘stylistics of existence’; metaphysics of the study of ‘existence as beautiful form’ is overshadowed by the history of subjectivity and the history of metaphysics and history of ideas devised to give ‘form to things, substances, colors, lights, sounds, and words.’ In other words, Foucault anticipates that aesthetics of art lies in describing the beauty of existence. He says, “This aesthetics of existence is an historical object which should not be neglected in favor of metaphysics of the soul or an aesthetics of things and words”

Edward W. Said has defined art and literature in terms of representation of the epochs, periods, and intellectual resistance. He appreciates Joyce’s Stephen as an artist for he has “resistant intellectual consciousness.” He equates the artist’s performance with intellectual performance. Artist, for him, is an intellectual being who advances ‘human freedom and knowledge.’ He condemned Flaubert’s The Sentimental Education for the artist’s “critique of intellectuals” and explained Deane’s unique idea about the nature of Dedalus. Said says, “Neither the protagonists of Dickens, nor Thackeray, nor Austen, nor Hardy, nor even George Eliot are young men and women whose major concern is the life of the mind in society, whereas for young Dedalus “thinking is a mode of experiencing the world.” For him, the function of the artist is to develop “a resistant intellectual consciousness” (Said 16) in the reader. The artist should also develop “a resistant intellectual consciousness … before he can become the artist.” (Said 16) His thought of “a resistant intellectual consciousness” in artist witnesses what he further says:

After all, many novelists, painters, and poets, like Manzoni, Picasso, or Neruda, have embodied the historical experience of their people in aesthetic works, which in turn become recognized as great masterpieces. For the intellectual the task, I believe , is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the sufferings of others.

Emmanuel Levinas in “Reality and its Shadow” deplores aesthetics of Art for Art’s Sake rudely. “The formula is false inasmuch as it situates art above reality and recognizes no master for it, and it is immoral inasmuch as it liberates the artist from his duties as a man and assures him of a pretentious and facile nobility… Art does not know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge.’

Jean-Francois Lyotard’s essay “An Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?” characterizes the aesthetics in terms of the postmodernism. For him, the social system is not representable; it does not capacitate to anyone or any source to envision itself at all. It is a challenge for art, and art takes stand against this challenge. For Lyotard, Art is potential to demonstrate world that is a discontinuous, and that is made of failure system. The job of an artist is to demonstrate this failure system. He deploys aesthetics style in defining postmodernism. Lyotard is a great admirer of Kant and Kantian tradition of the theory of sublime and beauty. For him, the formulation of the sublime is potential to present “the existence of something unpresentable.” Postmodernism explains the threads of recurring images of the modernism that represents the failure of its attempt to present the human mind and society as they are. For this failure, postmodernism had to come in action to cope with challenges of which Modernism remained an unfinished project. This is one of the reasons for the postmodernist art seems unrepresentable. It is matter to note that the Aesthetes were also experiencing the unpresentable human society and life. Baudelaire and his followers have already illustrated the idea that everything is hieroglyphic. Lyotard differentiates the modernist and postmodernist art based on his reading of Proust and Joyce. The attributes he gives to postmodernist art are identical to the artistry of writers belonging to Art for Art’s Sake or Aestheticism. The postmodern art inquiries into new presentations – not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable.” 

A famous illustrator of books for children Sarah Garland (2008) defends and asserts that ‘far from being a de-humanized, aestheticism here offers a complex knot of human concerns. It offers an interrogation of the values and responsibilities of subjectivity, the place of desire, objects, and appearances in the most intimate levels of consciousness, and a nexus of dilemmas about class, power, taste, and interpretation’ (2008: 205)

References

1. Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen & La Fanfarlo. Hackett. 2008. Xxvi.
2. Beardsley, Monroe C., Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1958. Print.
3. Bradley, A. C., “Poetry for Poetry’s Sake.” Oxford Lectures on Poetry. London: Macmillan, 3–36. 1909. Print.
4. Bermúdez, José Luis and Sebastian Gardner, Art and Morality (2003) Routledge, 2005. 127. Print.
5. Davies, Stephen et al. (1992) Companion to Aesthetics. Blackwell. 2009. Print. Eliot, T.S. Selected Essay. London: Faber & Faber. 1919. Print.
6. —        “Experiment in Criticism” The Bookman ed. Seward Collins. Vol. LXX. November 1929. No. 3. Pp. 226-27
7. Ellman, Richard. Oscar Wilde. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1987. Print.
8. Forster, E. M. “Art for Art’s Sake.” Two Cheers for Democracy. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 88–95. 1951. Print.
9. Foucault, M. The Courage of the Truth (2008). Ed. by Frédéric Gros. Trans. Graham Burchell. Palgrave 2011. UK.
10. Garland, Sarah. “ “This temptation to be undone …” Sontag, Barthes, and the Uses of Style” ”. Art and Life in Aestheticism: De-Humanizing or Re-Humanizing Art. Ed. Kelly Comfort. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. 2008. Print.