Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes; those in parentheses refer to page numbers or other divisions of quoted texts.
The phrase “art
for art’s sake” is so familiar that one may fail to notice that its accepted meaning
is not explicit but rather is conveyed by indirect implication. Art, after all, can scarcely be altogether
autotelic since without human beings art can have no value or meaning whatever.
[1] It is absurd to imagine that a score
of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would serve any end at all were there no people
to hear and appreciate it. When a
critical statement maintains the worth of “art for art’s sake,” it really means
that art is justified, not for some abstract theoretical inherent worth, but
because it provides pleasure to people. [2]
The very evasion of this direct statement looks like a kind of residual puritanical
euphemism masking hedonism [3], though pleasure, of course, has many varieties,
from simple entertainment through sensuality to experiences of the
sublime. The phrase implies as well a
criterion for evaluating works of art that foregrounds form and style rather
than content or theme.
The original
occurrences of the expression, though, bore a rather different meaning. Apparently, the phrase first appears in
Benjamin Constant’s account of a visit with Schiller and English expatriate
Henry Crabb Robinson (a student of Schelling) [4] whom he recorded as declaring
directly that art could have no function or end outside itself without being
deformed. Constant specifically mentions
the roots of the concept extending through Schelling to Kant. Though pleasure does play a role in determinations
of beauty, the German Idealist lineage would be unsatisfied with either
pleasure alone as the raison d'être of art or the pursuit of purely
abstract formal value. Kant and
Schelling would claim for art a truth, indeed a truth more profoundly true than
most. The phrase, once forged, was
developed and mutated in subsequent authors.
The phrase next
appeared in print in an 1818 essay by Victor Cousin that insisted “We must have
religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for
art’s 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.” [5] Cousin’s
commonsense “Eclecticism” began from a material base. “Man is sensible to pleasure and pain: he
shuns the one and seeks the other.” (lecture 12) He declared that “art is the free reproduction
of the beautiful” with no other end in mind.
“The sole object of art is the beautiful. Art abandons itself as soon as it shuns
this.” (lec. 9) While he recognized the
autonomy of aesthetics in statements like these, his philosophy continued to link
the beautiful to the good, the true, and the divine, so, unsurprisingly,
ulterior considerations of morality and spirituality linger in spite of his
formula “l’art pour l’art.”
Causin
emphatically denies that beauty entails desire.
For his belated neo-Platonism aesthetic the experience of beauty is not
limited to pleasure (which he trivializes by calling it “the agreeable”) or
indeed to sensation or to sensual imagination at all. It is rather based in reason and indeed for
him ethics are likewise aesthetic, because the good, the true, and the
beautiful are, on the most sublime level, all one. (lec. 6)
It is in the
cheeky preface of Gautier to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin that the
line blossoms into its principal role as a controversialist slogan of the
aesthetic party. It is as a cri de
coeur that it has survived to the present.
Its advocates have energetically opposed the traditional role of art in
teaching morality (and the more subtle claims of humanists that art is
uplifting or ennobling) and the complementary claims of reformers that art must
subserve the goal of social justice.
Gautier there
maintains categorically that “there is nothing really beautiful save what is of
no possible use.” (9) With the bohemian impudence that endeared him to Pound,
Gautier ridicules attention to “virtue,” calling her “a very pleasant
grandmother, but a grandmother.” [10] He
would prefer to gaze with pleasure on Dorinne’s bosom (47) and in general
recommends a hedonistic life devoted to the bottle, the pipe, and Pantagruel
(48). The contrast with Cousin’s
discomfort around desire and pleasure could hardly be more marked. He seeks to êpater la bourgeoisie as he
cheerfully identifies himself as “the most enormously immoral individual in
Europe or elsewhere.” (53) He muses on
the progress possible were a “large reward” provided for anyone who could
invent a new pleasure.” In sum, he
declares, “to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful
thing on this earth.” (83)
Whistler’s lecture
“Ten O’Clock,” for which he sent formal invitations as though for a dinner
party at an unusual hour, declared his artistic notions with similar high
spirits. For him art is “selfishly
occupied with her own perfection only” (4), having nothing whatever to do with
a benefit of any kind (5). He will have
nothing to do with any literary or narrative reading of paintings (16) or an
educational end (21). While he does
pause to ridicule Oscar Wilde as a clotheshorse (23), for him the value of art
is formal. “The painter’s poetry,” for
Whistler, consists of his arranging “form and colour into such perfect harmony,
that exquisiteness is the result.” With
such creativity, or “invention,” and not from profound ideas or novel insights,
the artist’s work gains a “dignity” and “nobility of thought.” (17) He maintained in “The Red Rag” (reprinted in The
Gentle Art of Making Enemies) “Art should be independent of all
clap-trap—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. All these have no kind of concern with
it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”
Whistler’s
lecture, like Gautier’s preface is lit with high spirits and fleering if dry
remarks. He expresses discomfort at
having to “appear in the role of the Preacher” (3) and imagines a scene in
which “the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful
is the Venus of Melos was their own Eve.” (15)
Unabashedly elitist, he deplores that art has become of late “a sort of
common topic for the tea-table” useful for signaling one’s “culture and
refinement.” (3) Yet he mocks art historians
as well who “frequent museums and burrow in crypts,” seeking to “establish with
due weight” unimportant reputations” and in the process reduce Art to
statistics (18-19). Far from hoping like
William Morris to bring art to everyone, he wishes to “lift from their [the
public’s] shoulders this incubus of Art.” (22)
In both Gautier
and Whistler, the formal pleasures of art are its sole reward. Their sassy tone is merely the seasoning
indicating their dissent from the age-old formula naming delight and
instruction as art’s goals. That many
thought this belief arose from an artistic milieu that not only considered
immorality irrelevant to aesthetics, but was suspected of actually cultivating
sin only attracted more attention to these writers. Indeed, the poses of many among the decadents
and aesthetes of the time often encouraged this view.
So, far from
being claiming that art is entirely autotelic, the phrase “art for art’s sake” was
used to assert the value of the pleasure beauty inspires and the primacy of
form over content. What the expression
most often signifies is that pleasure, whatever form it may take -- whether
simple entertainment, inspiration, or spiritual afflatus, is the only “final
cause” of art and that this value consists arises from purely abstract formal
patterning. An examination of nineteenth
century uses of the phrase indicates that the line was employed as a
provocation to the bourgeoisie by counter-cultural artists eager to
disassociate themselves from conventional respectability. Strong reactions condemned the notion. For instance, an unsigned editorial in The
Art World was titled “Art for Art's Sake: Its Fallacy and Viciousness.” [8] This, of course, is precisely the reaction
the artists were seeking.
1. Originally “l’art
pour l’art,” in Stefan George “Kunst für die Kunst.” The use of “ars gratia artis” in the
MGM logo must strike the viewer as ironic in light of Hollywood cinema’s
undisputed profit motives. I ignore here
a certain generic truth in the proposition in the sense that not only every
creative or intellectual field, but indeed every technical skill, can be judged
only by its own standards, applied by practitioners. Thus only a carpenter may fully appreciate
the skill of another carpenter and only a highly trained practicing musician
can best evaluate another’s performance.
2. In The Sense of
Beauty Santayana defines beauty as “objectified pleasure.”
3. In a seminar, with
five or six other graduate students, all of whom had presumably pursued
literary study because they love to read, I once ventured to suggest that
pleasure was a motive for consuming art.
The professor drily responded, “Mr. Seaton, we don’t talk about our
personal lives here.”
4. Benjamin Constant,
Journal intime, Jan. 1804. “Art
for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves
a purpose which is not its own.” (‘L'art
pour l'art, sans but, car tout but dénature l'art. Mais l'art atteint au but
qu'il n'a pas.”) The same sentiment
is recorded in Robinson’s own journals.
5. Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien [Sorbonne lectures,
1818] (1853) pt. 2. These talks had
originally appeared as Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des
lettres pendant l'année 1818.
6. Mademoiselle de
Maupin, translated by C. T.Brainard
(1900), p. 82.
7. James A. McNeil
Whistler, Ten O’Clock, a Lecture, 1916, p. 4.
8. Vol. 2, No. 2
(May, 1917).
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