What is “Art for Art’s Sake”?

The aestheticism of the 19th century had its own ideas about what is acceptable subject matter for art. The exotic and bizarre, the morbid and ugly, and the gilded and artificial. The transcendental synthesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment summarized all such trends and first lent weighty metaphysical authority to the pure aesthetic claim.

Emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life. And this, explained Wilde, was the reason why “all art is immoral.”

The theory of the art object itself during the English phase dwelt intently on the terms “art” and “beauty”. “Beauty” was something very pure very different from everything else. So was “art”. “Beauty”, said Wilde, “is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.”

For the highest criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impressive purely.

The aesthetic school had an equally peculiar altitude towards nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.