Art for art sake, is one thing but for virtue and beauty is more valid, however it’s just not something taught in the mainstream. Perhaps the institutionalization of education, which started in Britain and ran the course of the world, changing private education forever and diminishing the value of art education and practice.
Art saves! Art can make anything better. If all else fails, we have art and when we are gone, there will remain art. Art exists where there is consciousness.
“Art for art’s sake” is the usual English rendering of a French slogan from the early 19th century, “l’art pour l’art“, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only “true” art, is divorced from any didactic, moral, or utilitarian function. Such works are sometimes described as “autotelic“, from the Greek autoteles, “complete in itself”, a concept that has been expanded to embrace “inner-directed” or “self-motivated” human beings.
The term is sometimes used commercially. A Latin version of this phrase, “ARS GRATIA ARTIS“, is used as a motto by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the circle around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in its motion picture logo.
History
“L’art pour l’art” (translated as “art for art’s sake”) is credited to Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), who was the first to adopt the phrase as a slogan in the preface to his 1835 book, Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier was not, however, the first to write those words: they appear in the works of Victor Cousin,[1] Benjamin Constant, and Edgar Allan Poe. For example, Poe argues in his essay “The Poetic Principle” (1850):
We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake […] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: – but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.[2]
“Art for art’s sake” was a bohemian creed in the nineteenth century, a slogan raised in defiance of those who – from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of socialist realism – thought that the value of art was to serve some moral or didactic purpose. It was a rejection of the marxist aim of politicising art. “Art for art’s sake” affirmed that art was valuable as art, that artistic pursuits were their own justification and that art did not need moral justification – and indeed, was allowed to be morally neutral or subversive.
In fact, James McNeill Whistler wrote the following in which he discarded the accustomed role of art in the service of the state or official religion, which had adhered to its practice since the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century: “Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone […] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.”[3]
Such a brusque dismissal also expressed the artist’s distancing himself from sentimentalism. All that remains of Romanticism in this statement is the reliance on the artist’s own eye and sensibility as the arbiter.
The explicit slogan is associated in the history of English art and letters with Walter Pater and his followers in the Aesthetic Movement, which was self-consciously in rebellion against Victorian moralism. It first appeared in English in two works published simultaneously in 1868: Pater’s review of William Morris‘s poetry in the Westminster Review and in William Blake by Algernon Charles Swinburne. A modified form of Pater’s review appeared in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), one of the most influential texts of the Aesthetic Movement.
In Germany, the poet Stefan George was one of the first artists to translate the phrase (“Kunst für die Kunst“) and adopt it for his own literary programme which he presented in the first volume of his literary magazine Blätter für die Kunst (1892). He was inspired mainly by Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists whom he had met in Paris, where he was friends with Albert Saint-Paul and consorted with the circle around Stéphane Mallarmé.
Criticism
Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that there is no art for art’s sake, arguing that the artist still expresses his/her being through it:
When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it still does not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless — in short, l’art pour l’art, a worm chewing its own tail. “Rather no purpose at all than a moral purpose!” — that is the talk of mere passion. A psychologist, on the other hand, asks: what does all art do? does it not praise? glorify? choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations. Is this merely a “moreover”? an accident? something in which the artist’s instinct had no share? Or is it not the very presupposition of the artist’s ability? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or rather at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life? Art is the great stimulus to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as aimless, as l’art pour l’art?[4]
Criticism by Marxists
Marxists have argued that art should be politicised for the sake of transmitting the socialist message[5].
George Sand, who was a socialist writer[6][7], wrote in 1872 that L’art pour l’art was an empty phrase, an idle sentence. She asserted that artists had a “duty to find an adequate expression to convey it to as many souls as possible,” ensuring that their works were accessible enough to be appreciated.[8]
Former Senegal president and head of the Socialist Party of Senegal Leopold Senghor and anti colonial Africanist writer Chinua Achebe have criticised the slogan as being a limited and Eurocentric view on art and creation. In “Black African Aesthetics,” Senghor argues that “art is functional” and that “in black Africa, ‘art for art’s sake’ does not exist.” Achebe is more scathing in his collection of essays and criticism entitled Morning Yet on Creation Day, where he asserts that “art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorised dog shit” (sic).[9]
Walter Benjamin, one of the developers of Marxist hermeneutics[10], discusses the slogan in his seminal 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He first mentions it in regard to the reaction within the realm of traditional art to innovations in reproduction, in particular photography. He even terms the “L’art pour l’art” slogan as part of a “theology of art” in bracketing off social aspects. In the Epilogue to the essay Benjamin discusses the links between fascism and art. His main example is that of Futurism and the thinking of its mentor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. One of the slogans of the Futurists was “Fiat ars – pereat mundus” (“Let art be created, though the world perish”). Provocatively, Benjamin concludes that as long as fascism expects war “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense of perception that has been changed by technology,” then this is the “consummation,” the realization, of “L’art pour l’art.”[11]
Diego Rivera, who in life was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and “a supporter of the revolutionary cause”[12], claims that the “art for art’s sake” theory would further divide the rich from the poor. Rivera goes on to say that since one of the characteristics of so called “pure art” was that it could only be appreciated by a few superior people, the art movement would strip art from its value as a social tool and ultimately make art into a currency-like item that would only be available to the rich. [13]
Former Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong said: “There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.
Art for Virtue Photo credit: Thomas Hawk on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC
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