Tradition
Aestheticism
Overview
Aestheticism (also known as the aesthetic movement) was an art movement in the late 19th century that valued the appearance of literature, music, fonts, and the arts over their functions. According to Aestheticism, art should be produced to be beautiful, rather than to teach a lesson, create a parallel, or perform another didactic purpose, a sentiment expressed in the slogan "art for art's sake". Aestheticism flourished, in the 1870s and 1880s, gaining prominence and the support of notable writers, such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Those seen as guided by the movement were known as Aesthetes.
Aestheticism challenged the values of mainstream Victorian culture, as many Victorians believed that literature and art fulfilled important ethical roles. Writing in The Guardian, Fiona MacCarthy states that "the aesthetic movement stood, in stark and sometimes shocking contrast, to the crass materialism of Britain, in the 19th century."
Aestheticism was named by the critic Walter Hamilton in The Aesthetic Movement in England (1882). By the 1890s, decadence, a term with origins in common with aestheticism, was in use, across Europe.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
This superiority of natural to artificial beauty in that it alone arouses an immediate interest, although as regards form the first may be surpassed by the second, harmonises with the refined and well-grounded habit of thought of all men who have cultivated their moral feeling. If a man who has taste enough to judge of the products of beautiful Art with the greatest accuracy and refinement willingly leaves a chamber…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Aestheticism is; the author is tied to Aestheticism in the knowledge graph.
But, for this very reason, what is called good taste takes fright at all more profound effects of art, and is silent where the reality comes in question, and where externalities and trivialities vanish. For when great passions and the movements of a profound soul are unveiled, we are no longer concerned with the finer distinctions of taste and its pettifogging particularities.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
States what Aestheticism is.
These _Letters on AEsthetic Culture_, without the aid of anything which the most sceptical could designate as superstition, trace out and attempt to sanction for us a system of morality, in which the sublimest feelings of the Stoic and the Christian are represented but as stages in our progress to the pinnacle of true human grandeur; and man, isolated on this fragment of the universe, encompassed with the boundless…
Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller Comprehending an Examination of His Works
The author is tied to Aestheticism in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Aestheticism
Related ideas
- Matthew Arnold
- Sartor Resartus
- Thomas Carlyle
- Great Britain
- Immanuel Kant
- Victor Cousin
- German Romanticism
- Music
- Literature
- The Guardian
- Materialism
- Aesthetics
- Oxford
- Oscar Wilde
- Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
- Walter Pater
- Morality
- Critique of Judgment
- Decadent movement
- France
- Art for art's sake
- Friedrich Schiller
- Didacticism
- Moral
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.