Art for art's sake
Art for art's sake—the usual English rendering of l'art pour l'art (pronounced
The term is sometimes used commercially. A
History
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The phrase "l'art pour l'art" ('art for art's sake') had been floating around the intellectual circles of Paris since the beginning of the 19th century, but it was Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) who first fully articulated its metaphysical meaning (as we now understand it) in the prefaces of his 1832 poetry volume Albertus, and 1835 novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin.[3]
Gautier was not the first nor the only one to use that phrase: it appeared in the lectures and writings of Victor Cousin[1] and Benjamin Constant. In his essay "The Poetic Principle" (1850) Edgar Allan Poe argues:
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.[4]
"Art for the sake of art" became a bohemian creed in the 19th century; a slogan raised in defiance of those—from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of socialist realism—who 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 the sake of art affirmed that art was valuable as art in itself; 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.[citation needed]
As such, 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 16th 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."[5] Such a brusque dismissal also expressed the artist's distancing of 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
Arnold Bennett made a facetious remark on the issue: "Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself? Not me. If anyone imagines my sole aim is art for art's sake, they are cruelly deceived."[8]
In Germany, the poet
Criticism
By Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche argued that there is 'no art for art's sake', the arts always expresses human values, communicate core beliefs:
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?[9]
By Marxists and socialists
George Sand, who was not a Marxist but a socialist writer,[11][12] 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.[13]
Senegalese president, head of the
Diego Rivera, who was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and "a supporter of the revolutionary cause," claims that the art for the sake of art 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.[18]
Chinese communist leader
See also
- Critical theory
- Intrinsic motivation
- Parnassianism
- Art for art
Notes
- ^ a b c "Art for art's sake" (revised ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. [1999] 2015.
- ^ "Aestheticism." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2020.
- ^ Schaffer, Aaron (1928). "Théophile Gautier and "L'art pour l'art"". The Sewanee Review. 36 (4): 405–417.
- ^ Poe, Edgar Allan (1850). "The Poetic Principle". E. A. Poe Society of Baltimore. Archived from the original on 18 August 2007. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
- ^ Edwards, Owen (April 2006). "Refined Palette". Smithsonian Magazine: 29. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
- ISBN 978-0-8223-0389-3.
- JSTOR 24634525.
- OCLC 364280.
- ^ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," § 24
- ^ "Marxism, Art and Utopia: Critical Theory and Political Aesthetics". 27 January 2017.
- ^ Hart, Kathleen (2004). Revolution and Women's Autobiography in Nineteenth-century France. Rodopi. p. 91.
- ^ Lewis, Linda M. (2003). Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist. University of Missouri Press. p. 48.
- ^ Letters of George Sand, Vol 3
- JSTOR 3820493.
- Heinemann Educational Books, p. 19. (Paperback reprint 1976. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, p. 25.)
- ^ Erasmus: Speculum Scientarium, 25, p. 162: "the different versions of Marxist hermeneutics by the examples of Walter Benjamin's Origins of the German Tragedy [sic], ... and also by Ernst Bloch's Hope the Principle [sic]."
- ISBN 0-00-686248-9.
- ^ Rivera, Diego. 1932. "The revolutionary spirit in modern art." The Modern Quarterly (Baltimore) 6(3):51–57. p. 52. – via International Center for the Arts of the Americas. Retrieved 2020 September 19.
- Quotations of Chairman Mao Zedong, accessed via the Marxists Internet Archive here.