{"id":132,"date":"2019-05-27T06:53:28","date_gmt":"2019-05-27T06:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp10.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=132"},"modified":"2019-05-28T12:28:18","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T12:28:18","slug":"art-for-arts-sake","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp10\/chapter\/art-for-arts-sake\/","title":{"rendered":"Art for Art\u2019s Sake"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\nObjectives<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

This module defines and characterizes the decadent literary movement and the critical school called Art for Art\u2019s Sake or Aestheticism. It includes a brief literature review, etymology, genesis, and practitioners of Art for Art\u2019s Sake along with their distinct principles and critical reception before 1960 and after.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nIntroduction<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Art for Art\u2019s Sake is a slogan of the literary movement Aestheticism developed in the Decadent period. The opening verse lines of John Keats\u2019s Endymion<\/em>, \u201cA thing of beauty is a joy for ever \/ Its loveliness increases \/ it will never \/ Pass into nothingness\u201d epitomize the principles represented through the slogan. Keats, therefore, is regarded as progenitor of Aestheticism.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The major pronouncement of Literature produced under the impact of Art for Art\u2019s Sake is that Literature reveals the power of beauty and taste before its readers and audiences. Art for Art\u2019s Sake is the trans-creation of l\u2019art pour l\u2019art<\/em>, which has expounded the tenets of the Aestheticism. Thus, Art for Art\u2019s Sake and Aestheticism has similar salient features as literary movements. Literally, Aestheticism is concerned with \u2018a set of principles, the nature, and appreciation of beauty\u2019 (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 Th\u00e9ophile 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\u2019s Sake as the literary movement.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

J. E. Spingarn\u2019s essay \u201cArt for Art's Sake: A Query\u201d (1907) reports that the term Art for Art\u2019s Sake is found in Thackeray\u2019s letter written in 1839: \u201cPlease God we shall begin, ere long, to love art for art's sake\u201d (Chapter From Some Memoirs <\/em>1895). However, the literary historians think that the outset of Art for Art\u2019s Sake is firstly observed in Victor Cousin\u2019s series of lectures\u00a0delivered in 1818, which was published later, entitled <\/span>Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good <\/em>(1854). Cousin mentions in the lecture:<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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We must have religion for religion\u2019s sake, morality for morality\u2019s sake, as with art for art\u2019s 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 <\/em>129)<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957), in an essay \u201cSaintsbury and Art for Art\u2019s Sake in England\u201d (1944) justifies Saintsbury as the follower of the Art for Art\u2019s Sake and the English aesthetic critic. In this essay she epitomizes the objective of Art for Art\u2019s Sake by illustrating one of Saintsbury\u2019s statements (1895): \u201cThe whole end, aim, and object of literature ... as of all art ... is beauty\u201d (Richardson). Albert Gu\u00e9rard in the essay \u201cArt for Art\u2019s Sake\u201d has also defined it in terms of signifying Literature as the paramount object of beauty:<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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\u2026Art 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.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Frank Kermode in Romantic Image <\/em>(1957) discusses Yeats\u2019 poem \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d in terms of Baudelaire\u2019s concept of artificial paradise and has defined Art for Art\u2019s Sake as the act of self-forgotten artist. Kermode clarifies it saying:<\/p>\r\n \r\n

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 \u2026 The\u00a0artist 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.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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R. V. Johnson in Aestheticism <\/em>(1969) has studied the aestheticism in three different applications:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n