The Meaning of Art for Art’s Sake

 

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).