Art for art's sake! This was the rallying cry of the literary cult, spearheaded by Theophile Gautier in 1835, that insisted on the separation of political and didactic agendas from artistic creation. Hot on the heels of German Romanticism, the torch... [more]

Art for art's sake! This was the rallying cry of the literary cult, spearheaded by Theophile Gautier in 1835, that insisted on the separation of political and didactic agendas from artistic creation. Hot on the heels of German Romanticism, the torch of Aestheticism was taken up in France by a legion of literary luminaries including Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and the Symbolist poets. Later in the century, in England, bons vivants such as Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater espoused the worship of art as an end unto itself. To have a beautiful life, they argued, one need only to surround one's self with beauty in any form: objects, landscapes, or good company. Deeply influenced by Immanuel Kant's theory of aesthetics, Wilde and the artists James Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley publicly scorned the trappings of mass culture. For the Aesthetes, the art is the thing: beauty should be completely understood outside of any practical purposes and only in service to itself. Their work stood in naked abhorrence to the crippling confines of middle-class morality and commercial interests, which in their eyes sullied the purity of the creative impulse. Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed the voice of the Aesthete in America; these rapturous disciples to an ideal of pure beauty eloquently tried to protect the arts from the crass commercialism that would unfortunately come to define them in the coming century. [show less]