Aestheticism

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.

Origin

Aestheticism has its roots in German Romanticism. Though the term "aesthetic" derives from Greek, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750) made important use of it, in German, before Immanuel Kant incorporated it into his philosophy in the Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant, in turn, influenced Friedrich Schiller's Aesthetic Letters (1794) and his concept of art as Spiel (Play): "Man is never so serious as when he plays; man is wholly man only when he plays.” In the Letters, Schiller proclaimed salvation through art:

Man has lost his dignity, but Art has saved it and preserved it for him in expressive marbles.