Art for art sake

1. Definition:
Background
“All art is quite useless” (Wilde: 1985). This short statement of Oscar Wilde in his Preface toThe Picture of
Dorian Gray (1890) expresses one of the central aspects of the idea of Art for Art’s Sake: art shall have no other
aim than being art and it should be protected from subordination to any moral, didactic, social or political
purpose.
Introduction:
"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.
Ironically, the term is sometimes used commercially. A Latin version of this phrase, "ARS
GRATIA ARTIS", is used as a motto by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the circle
around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in its motion picture logo.
We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake […]
English Aesthetic Movement
The phrase “art for art’s sake” is associated in the history of English art and letters with the
Oxford don 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

2. 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. In his essays, Pater declared that life had to be
lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty.
The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement asserted that there was no connection
between art and morality, and tended to hold that the arts should provide refined sensuous
pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. They did not accept John
Ruskin andMatthew Arnold's utilitarian conception of art as something moral or useful. They
believed that art need only be beautiful, and developed the cult of beauty. Life should copy art,
and nature was considered crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main
characteristics of the movement were suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, extensive use
of symbols, and synaesthetic effects (correspondence between words, colors and music).
The concept of "art for art's sake" played a major role in Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture
of Dorian Gray.