Diapositiva 1

1
Aestheticism Art for art's sake
2
Context

• What? The aesthetic movement, part of the
  Decadent movement
• Where? Europe (mainly England)
• When? The last decades of XIX century
• Who? Visual artists and writers
• Why? Reaction against the romantic way of reading
  art and against restrictions of industrial
  society

3
Walter Pater

• Graduated and professor at Queen's College of
  Oxford
• Mainly influenced by J. Ruskin's Modern Painters
  and by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
• His method is visible in the Preface to Studies
  in the Italian Renaissance
• He became the pillar of a lot of younger artists
  like O. Wilde, J. Joyce and W. Yeats
• He is considered the founder and theorist of
  Aestheticism

4
Origins

• The Theorist Walter Pater
• Concept of Time it is like a flowing river

5
The Pillars of the Aesthetic Movement

• Nature is crude if compared to art ? Life should
  copy art ? Criticism to Realism and Romanticism
• Eternal youth ? Impossible ? Tedium of everyday
  life
• Beauty as the primary element of art ? Art should
  only show beauty it has no other aims
• ?
• Art for Art's sake

6
Philosophical Aestheticism

• Roots in I. Kant's thought ? Beauty is not a
  feature of the object, but it is a relationship
  between it and the observer
• Deeper analyzed from A. Schopenhauer ? Beauty
  and Sublime
• And further on from S. Kierkegaard ? I stage
  Aesthetic
• Last but not least F. Nietzsche ? Dionysian
  (Aestheticism) over Apollinen spirit (Ratio), in
  contrast totraditional thought.

7
Moral Aestheticism

• Aestheticism as a life style ? Art over Virtue
• Gabriele D'Annunzio ? Art as an expression of
  metamorphosis due to one's awareness of human
  limits
• Oscar Wilde ? Artist as creator of beautiful
  things
• Critics as a subjective judgment
• Vice and Virtues are material for an artist,
  language is the instrument
• ? All art is quite useless