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‘Art for art’s sake’. Seems a rather harmless, if indulgent, way of looking at art, surely? If a group of aesthetes, say Oscar Wilde and his friends, just want to focus on formal elements of art, rather than asking political or moral questions, where’s the problem? Surely they’re not hurting anyone? The basic idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ is that while artworks might have moral or ideological arguments, that is not what makes them great art. Great art can only be great if it is great *art*. In other words: we can disagree with something morally whilst recognising its beauty or excellence. Thus, if we are to judge something as great art, all we should really be asking is: ‘is it sublime? Is it beautiful?’ We might find that idea a bit stupid, but it’s hard to see it as malicious.
Well this seemingly innocuous idea has drawn the fury of conservative religious thinkers, political scientists, economists, communists, fascists – everyone who believes in the primacy of morality. The Marxist thinker Walter Benjamin even accuses ‘art for art’s sake’ of leading to fascism. There are few artistic ideas which draw such fury from moral critics as the idea of aestheticism. Indeed, ‘aesthete’ was for much of the twentieth century an insult: someone with no morality.
Why is this? Well, aestheticism is related to another movement: decadence. This movement was one which not only preached ‘art for art’s sake’ but preached an indulgence in all of life’s pleasures: it was a direct contradiction of all expected morality. To its opponents, it represented the decay of moral life. Aestheticism and decadence produced a sense of moral panic amongst established thinkers and, I contend, still does to this day.
In this course, I want to explore the ways in which ‘art for art’s sake’ is actually a serious philosophical and moral proposition, and I want to demonstrate the ways that it brings about a sense of moral panic in its opponents. Aestheticism, the movement that grew up around the idea, and made famous by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, promoted a kind of Epicureanism: the belief that the life of the senses, the life of pleasure and experience, was the good life. This idea was furiously rejected and I wish to explore why.
We will begin by looking at the origins of ‘art for art’s sake’ in France, then move on to Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater, who developed the idea in England. We will then look at Pater’s students, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Ernest Dowson. We will also look at aestheticism and decadence in the visual arts, from Gustave Moreau to Aubrey Beardsley, whose interest in non-traditional forms and eroticism caused outrage amongst their Victorian contemporaries.
Key texts will be: Walter Pater, Extracts from The Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean, and Oscar Wilde, Extracts from Dorian Grey, and Salomé. |
