Art for Art's sake

[stlukesguild]

so basically what you're saying is that you produce art for art's sake.

The art that I have created over the years was created with various intentions. I rarely ever thought of creating merely for the sake of making something "beautiful". Nevertheless, I believe that the success or failure of my work is dependent not upon my having said the right thing... expressed the proper political views... but rather upon its success as a work of art.

[SleepyWitch]

THE PREFACE

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal
the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.
For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things
mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban
seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of
Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man
forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality
of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true
can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical
sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art
of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's
craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work
is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree,
the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man
for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one
admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR WILDE

Maybe it helps to keep in mind the social and historical circumstances in which this movement originated?
my knowlege of English history is rather hazy, but I think at the time Wilde wrote this, the English/British as a nation where busy administering their Empire, trading goods, keeping their industry going, becoming rich etc. In other words, they were interested mainly in practical (=useful) things.
For example, learning about Geography or joining the military was a good idea, because it served some practical purpose within this system, i.e. it was taken for granted that these things were useful. Everything you did had to serve some purpose withing this accepted system of values and you were not supposed to do things for their own sake.
Also, people moralized about virtually anything and were extremely prim and proper. But who knows what they were up to behind the scenes?
Maybe they had forbidden desires? If they indulged in them in secret, they lied to the world at large. If they suppresed them, they lied to themselves.
And of course (and this is my very personal subjective opinion), the same people who whored around and smoked opium themselves (or would have liked to but didn't) would go ostracizing their neighbour if they caught him at it.

So society at that time was quite extreme in its moral views and aestheticism can be seen as an equally extreme reaction to that.
Of course, Wilde's book was bound to shock those prim and proper people, seeing as it's about a (homosexual?) man who sells his soul, does drugs, is responsible for the suicide of a young girl, kills his friend in cold blood.
Of course, people would be shocked by the book, especially because many people expect books to provide moral guidance. Many people have difficulty seeing a novel as only a novel, they assume it's some kind of manual of how to live your life. They expect things in books to conform to received social values and expect all characters in books to be shining examples of morality.
I.e. a book has to contribute to reader's sentimental education (i.e. have an effect on their real lives) and tell them what they know best alraedy: that their moral values are justified and how to live by them. In other words: a books has to be useful, it has to have some practical purpose.
This works well for happy-clappy books in which characters most pressing problem is "Do I marry Mr A or Mr B? Mr A is nice and rich and Mr B is grumpy and even richer?" and in the end they marry and everyone's happy.

Now if you want to write a shocking book you might need to tell people, "Listen, if you feel compelled to imitate the behaviour of the character in this book, you've got only yourself to blame!"
---> you tell them that art is useless.

[PeterL]

I fundamentally disagree with Mr Wilde. Specifically,

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The creation of an artist is a reflection of the artist, separating the two is impossible.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

Was he excluding himself? Because Wilde's aim in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was to present a moral argument.

All art is quite useless.

That's news. Art, in the broader sense, includes all works of humans, everthing built, all artificial things, from a carved wooden bowl to a microprocessor to a nuclear reactor. Art is one term for what people do that is not purely biological. "Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature." (from Dictionary.com

Somethings that are art are quite useless, but most art is very useful.

[Virgil]

So how do ideas fit into art? St Lukes brings up an interesting point from his experience:

The art that I have created over the years was created with various intentions. I rarely ever thought of creating merely for the sake of making something "beautiful". Nevertheless, I believe that the success or failure of my work is dependent not upon my having said the right thing... expressed the proper political views... but rather upon its success as a work of art.

Let me be so bold as put forth the following:

What inspire artists (fine art) are artistic ideas. Now that may seem ambiguous to someone who is not an artist, but in my observation of artists talking, they seem to be imply this.

Same thing may be said for musicians. What inspire musical composers are musical ideas.

Let me attempt this for the literary arts.

What inspire poets are language ideas (poetry being the art of arranging language).

What inspire playwrights are dramatic ideas (plays being the art of arranging performance).

What inspire short story writers are tale telling ideas (the short story being the art of arranging stories).

What inspire novelists are experience telling ideas (novel being the art of arranging experience).

The ideas are not some philosophic undertaking but central to the medium of the art form. Nobody wants to read a novel expounding Hume’s ideas, for instance. You can read an essay about it if you like and understand it way better than a novel. It’s how the novel is shaped (and therefore, how experience is shaped) by Hume’s thoughts that makes it interesting as a work of art. And so we get a great novel called Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern.

[Redzeppelin]

A wonderful discussion topic (though, as PeterL correctly pointed out - one that takes place over the ambiguity of the word "art" - another good thread-in-waiting, unless we decide to dive into it here).

Lawrence Perrine, a literature anthology editor, once wrote a wonderful essay discussing the question "Why read literature?" ("literature" as the idea of written "art"). In the essay, Perrine essentially said that the difference between "entertainment" reading and "literature" was the vision of reality that the work presented. Literature, he said, "broadens and deepens our experience and awareness of life..[it] takes us, throught the imagination, deeper into the real world: it enables us to understand our troubles..[it] has as its object pleasure plus understanding." Perrine did not say literature had to be "realistic" but that it had to enrich our sense of reality. I think that's well said. C.S. Lewis said something similar in his Reflections on the Psalms in that he believed that all great literature involved the sincere search for truth.

Note that those definitions do not say that literature (art) needed to be didactic - only that it had, as its goal, truth/reality. (I know that I discussed literature instead of art in general, but I thought I'd deal with the subcategory I'm most familiar with ).

But in terms of visual and sonic art? That's a different question (maybe?).

[stlukesguild]

...at the time Wilde wrote this, the English/British as a nation where busy administering their Empire, trading goods, keeping their industry going, becoming rich etc... Everything you did had to serve some purpose withing this accepted system of values and you were not supposed to do things for their own sake. Also, people moralized about virtually anything and were extremely prim and proper. But who knows what they were up to behind the scenes?

None of that happening today, eh?

[stlukesguild]

I fundamentally disagree with Mr Wilde. Specifically,

Quote:
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The creation of an artist is a reflection of the artist, separating the two is impossible.

SLG- All art is a form of "self expression", indeed. To be otherwise is impossible. All self-expression, however, is not art (a baby crying, a teenager's diaries). Or perhaps, since the question of what art is has been broached, I should say that all self-expression is not good art. If the work lacks an aesthetic "beauty"... and this may include everything from the traditional "beauty" of a Raphael madonna, a Petrarchan sonnet, or a Mozart sonata as well as the sublime beauty of fear, horror, and tragedy found in Oedipus Rex, Beethoven, Goya, or Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic.

Quote:
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

Was he excluding himself? Because Wilde's aim in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was to present a moral argument.

SLG- I would certainly agree with you here. All artists cannot help but have ethical, political, religious, moral sympathies and these most certainly present themselves in the work. On the other hand, I don't see these sympathies as a valid standard by which to judge the success of the art. To do such adds up to a rejection of all art that does not meet our current sympathies (ie. Shakespeare and Wagner are anti-Semitic so their art is bad) and leads to an expectation that an artist give form to only that which is communaly agreed upon and not that which is is felt/believed/thought by the unique individual.

Quote:
All art is quite useless.

That's news. Art, in the broader sense, includes all works of humans, everthing built, all artificial things, from a carved wooden bowl to a microprocessor to a nuclear reactor. Art is one term for what people do that is not purely biological. "Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature." (from Dictionary.com

Somethings that are art are quite useless, but most art is very useful.

SLG- Wilde, of course, was very clear in his definition of art. He obviously differentiated craft from art and illustration from "fine art". He obviously agreed 100% with Mallarme who noted that the bathroom was the most useful room in the home... but certainly not the most aesthetic/beautiful. Today, post "Arts and Crafts Movement", post Bauhaus, post Duchamp, and post 1960s obsessions with "sef-expression" anything can be claimed as art... even your microprocessor, your nuclear reactor... or the turd in the bowell (and such has been presented as art). So why not murder as fine art? DeQuincy played with this idea parodying the nascent Romatic notions that everything could be art. So is Hitler then the crown genius of murder as art? The Holocaust nothing more than a great theatre macabre?

[stlukesguild]

Let me be so bold as put forth the following:

What inspire artists (fine art) are artistic ideas. Now that may seem ambiguous to someone who is not an artist, but in my observation of artists talking, they seem to be imply this.


Virgil... this is indeed, from my experience, somewhat close to the actuality of how an artist thinks. One does not become a visual artist because one wants to speak out against injustice, warfare, racism, sexism, etc... (although such elements may enter into one's art). One does not become an artist because one has studied and admired the great masters and wants to become such oneself (although certainly many/most artists have studied the work of their predecessors. One becomes an artist because one loves playing with the elements of art: lines and colors and shapes and textures, etc... and organizing them. Without this all one has is ideas or feelings without a love of the methods through which to convey them. When most artists look at another artist's work... shall we say a contemporary?... they do not engage in discussions of what is being expressed... in the "feelings" or ideas conveyed. The discussions center rather upon what is or is not "working" in the composition... the color relationships... the use of materials... the manipulation of paint or ink, etc... Yes, we recognize the ideas and the feelings conveyed... but then perhaps it is something like being a magician... we understand the "tricks"... we know know that a certain color combination can convey a given mood... we know that this or that subject will be inherently interpretted in a certain manner. Certainly there are still works of art that move us... but we are far more likely to be moved with awe at the manner in which a certain artist has achieved his or her work. We don't well up in response to the ideas conveyed in the Sistine cieling, but rather to how brilliantly these ideas were conveyed and given form by that individual known as Michelangelo.

[PeterL]

[COLOR="Teal"]
SLG- All art is a form of "self expression", indeed. To be otherwise is impossible. All self-expression, however, is not art (a baby crying, a teenager's diaries). Or perhaps, since the question of what art is has been broached, I should say that all self-expression is not good art. If the work lacks an aesthetic "beauty"... and this may include everything from the traditional "beauty" of a Raphael madonna, a Petrarchan sonnet, or a Mozart sonata as well as the sublime beauty of fear, horror, and tragedy found in Oedipus Rex, Beethoven, Goya, or Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic.

I would contend that the teenager's diary is art, as much as Oedipus Rex is. All art is self-expression, but what differentiates it from the baby's cry is consciousness of the expression, the thought that goes behind the expression. If nothing is expressed, then there is no art.

SLG- I would certainly agree with you here. All artists cannot help but have ethical, political, religious, moral sympathies and these most certainly present themselves in the work. On the other hand, I don't see these sympathies as a valid standard by which to judge the success of the art. To do such adds up to a rejection of all art that does not meet our current sympathies (ie. Shakespeare and Wagner are anti-Semitic so their art is bad) and leads to an expectation that an artist give form to only that which is communaly agreed upon and not that which is is felt/believed/thought by the unique individual.

I believe that people can validly judge art, of any kind, by the content, if they wish to. I understand why others might disagree with that. Without the content, there is no art. Is the form, the expression itself, better or worse for the content? I say that the form is inconsequential without the content.

SLG- Wilde, of course, was very clear in his definition of art. He obviously differentiated craft from art and illustration from "fine art". He obviously agreed 100% with Mallarme who noted that the bathroom was the most useful room in the home... but certainly not the most aesthetic/beautiful. Today, post "Arts and Crafts Movement", post Bauhaus, post Duchamp, and post 1960s obsessions with "sef-expression" anything can be claimed as art... even your microprocessor, your nuclear reactor... or the turd in the bowell (and such has been presented as art). So why not murder as fine art? DeQuincy played with this idea parodying the nascent Romatic notions that everything could be art. So is Hitler then the crown genius of murder as art? The Holocaust nothing more than a great theatre macabre?

The use of "art" to mean things made by humans goes back much further than the 1970's, or the 1940's. I would contend that "the turd in the bowell" is less art than a microprocessor, because it is a natural product not created by the creativity of humans but by biological processes. Displaying it as art is somewhat artful.

It appears that you define art by some aestetic standard. I don't know your standard, so I can't judge that, but people have been trying for millenia to define art and beauty, and related matters. There are quite a few books about it, but I don't think that a real definition has been discovered.

[omegaxx]

This is such a thought-provoking thread. I'll attempt to give my $.02 on whether art can be divorced from a cultural context and the relationship between art and morality according to Oscar Wilde.

I've been meaning to contribute to this discussion. So here goes. Several points.

Another point I wish to make is that one must not confuse the notion that specific art forms are a craft that requires the manipulation of a particular medium. Some have argued that you can’t string together words randomly that sound beautiful but have no meaning. I agree but perhaps for different reasons. But the basis of your argument is that art in general requires meaning. That it needs to have some philosophic/moral/intellectual point. But literature (poetry, novels, short stories) is a form that uses words as the medium for creativity, the building blocks if you will. Their very nature requires meaning to be present. As a parallel, the building block of pottery is clay. You can’t make a work of pottery out of paper, and still be called a work of pottery. Words/sentences/paragrapghs are the clay of literary art forms. In order to create a literary art form it must be created within the context of meaning. It’s not that art requires significance, it’s because the medium itself is built up of meaning. Fine art is the art of arranging shapes and images; music is the art of arranging sound. That is why it is clear that they don’t require the same need for intellectual content as literature, which is the art of arranging language (at it’s most general definition).

I can't agree with you more there, Virgil. The fact that literature employs words, rather than colour or music notes, makes it impossible to extricate literature from culture. Words have nothing to do with reality. A-P-P-L-E does not have any intrinsic connection to the thing I'm munching right now. It's only by the endorsement of the dictionary and a couple of centuries of tradition do we agree that an "apple" refers to an apple. Language is also a site of cultural discourse. Each word is laden with additional layers of meanings invested by the culture. An "apple" is just an apple, but we may be counted on to sniff for traces of Genesis as soon as we encouter the word "apple" in a poem. Context matters. I would never read the "apple" my 5-year-old niece scribbled down beside her stencil sketch of an apple the same way as I read the "apple" that Lolita carries around in front of Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's book.

I loved Wilde. I still do, although I disagree with him constantly now. I haven't got much to say for The Picture of Dorian Gray, except that I think it's bad form-wise compared to the great Victorian novels More relevant to the discussion of art and morality is, I think, the following passages from De Profundis:

"Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul."

"When [Christ] says, 'Forgive your enemies,' it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate. In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor,' it is not of the state of the poor that he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that wealth was marring."

To me, Wilde has inverted the relationship between morality and beauty. A thing is not beautiful because it's moral. A thing is not beautiful because it's amoral. Rather, a thing is moral because it's beautiful; beauty comes before morality in the creation of things.

This idea is beautiful but problematic to the highest point. What defines beauty then? Wilde would suggest sorrow, based on the first quote there. Thus we should go to Iraq and tell the people whose arms have been bombed off and whose houses are razed to the ground that their lives are beautiful and good. Poof. Are the lampshades of the ***** of Belsen beautiful then? Sure they are original. I heard they look quite good, and there is plenty of sorrow in them. They pass the beauty test--so they are moral? Gimme a break Oscar

Also I wonder about the cultural standards of beauty, say feminine beauty. Lucy Liu is ugly by Chinese standards, every Chinese would tell you that. But she made it into Time's 100 most beautiful people on earth? If even something as objective as how a woman looks vary so much from culture to culture, how can we judge a work's aesthetic value without referring to our contemporary environment?

The only way I judge the beauty of a book, nowadays, is judging by how well the author transcends the limits of language (form) and of thoughts (content) at his/her time. So far that test has been going quite well

Oh dear, I've rambled on and on without any sort of focus *slithers away in shame*

[godhelpme2]

effete ephebes is what i call literary dabblers concerned exclusively with effect. for god's sake get out or as hamlet says "there are more things on heaven and earth than are ever dreamt of in your philosophies, so therefore as a stranger give it welcome."

I haven't come here for several days,but i'm extremely surprised and happy to find that there are so many guys involved in this tread. I take everyone's opinion valuable and unique.
Can anyone tell me the meaning of chasetalling's words?
I subtly feel it offensive. Is it so or only a misunderstanding?

[Virgil]

The only way I judge the beauty of a book, nowadays, is judging by how well the author transcends the limits of language (form) and of thoughts (content) at his/her time. So far that test has been going quite well

Omega, you have some interesting points, some of which I may or may not disagree. But the quoted passage struck me. Can you explain what you mean? First of all, how can one transcend a limit? By definition that's an impossibility. If they transcend it, then it wasn't a limit.

[Jean-Baptiste]

I'm sorry, godhelpme, I can't actually make out what is being said there. I wouldn't take it as offensive. I don't know how to take it, but surely not offensive. Perhaps Chase could rephrase it for us.

Now, Virgil, it seems unnecessary to decry an oxymoron as though it were meant in earnest. I'm sure you can give Omega a small license for figures of speech.

[Virgil]

Well, I wasn't really picking on him. I kind of know what he meant by the phrase. However I don't know what he specifically means as it relates to the subject at hand. How does a writer transcend? Does he mean be the best of his times? That wouldn't have very much significance. Transcend "the limits of language"? Do you know what that means? Does he mean writing in blood? Or what? So then I don't have a clue as to what he means. But it does seem interesting.

[Wild Apple]

Omega, you have some interesting points, some of which I may or may not disagree. But the quoted passage struck me. Can you explain what you mean? First of all, how can one transcend a limit? By definition that's an impossibility. If they transcend it, then it wasn't a limit.

In general, like Jean Baptiste said, you could have allowed such a thing to pass. Even so, your own point is incorrect. The Oxford English Dictionary defines transcend as:

1. To pass over or go beyond (a physical obstacle or limit); to climb or get over the top of (a wall, mountain, etc.).
2. To pass or extend beyond or above (a non-physical limit); to go beyond the limits of (something immaterial); to exceed.

So not only does a phrase 'transcending a limit' make sense, but (unless your using very concise language) it is completely necessary.