Art for art's sake  

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-"'''Art for art's sake'''" is the usual [[English language|English]] rendering of a [[French language|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 lesson|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.+"'''Art for art's sake'''" is the usual [[English language|English]] rendering of a [[French language|French]] [[slogan]], from the early 19th century, '''''''l'art pour l'art''''''', and expresses a philosophy that the [[Intrinsic and extrinsic properties (philosophy)|intrinsic]] value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any [[didactic]], [[moral lesson|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.
A [[pseudo-Latin]] version of this phrase, "'''''Ars gratia artis'''''", is used as a slogan by [[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer]] and appears in the circle around the roaring head of [[Leo the Lion (MGM)|Leo the Lion]] in their [[motion picture]] logo.<!--Also, Delta House from the movie National Lampoon's Animal House use it as their motto, as can be seen on their fraternity flag.--> A [[pseudo-Latin]] version of this phrase, "'''''Ars gratia artis'''''", is used as a slogan by [[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer]] and appears in the circle around the roaring head of [[Leo the Lion (MGM)|Leo the Lion]] in their [[motion picture]] logo.<!--Also, Delta House from the movie National Lampoon's Animal House use it as their motto, as can be seen on their fraternity flag.-->

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"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.

A pseudo-Latin version of this phrase, "Ars gratia artis", is used as a slogan by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the circle around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in their 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 doctrine as a slogan by saying "everything useful is ugly". Gautier was not, however, the first to write those words: they appear in the works of Victor Cousin ("Il faut comprendre et aimer la morale pour la morale, la religion pour la religion, l'art pour l'art", Revue des deux mondes, 1845), Benjamin Constant (L'art pour l'art, sans but, car tout but dénature l'art, 1804), and Edgar Allan Poe. For example, Poe argues in his essay "The Poetic Principle" (1850), that

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.

Poe epigonist Charles Baudelaire clarified the position in the phrase from "New Notes on Edgar Poe' (1859).

"Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem."
La poésie … n’a pas d’autre but qu’elle-même ; elle ne peut pas en avoir d’autre, et aucun poème ne sera si grand, si noble, si véritablement digne du nom de poème, que celui qui aura été écrit uniquement pour le plaisir d’écrire un poème.

"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. "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 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

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.

Criticisms

George Sand 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.

Contemporary postcolonial African writers such as Leopold Senghor and 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".

The German Marxist essayist and critic Walter Benjamin 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 fascist Futurists was "Fiat ars - pereat mundus" ("Let art be created. Let 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".

See also




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