Aestheticism: an introduction

Saturday, 19 February 2011

"Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life." -Oscar Wilde-

Historically aesthetes have been satirised and accused of exaggerated individualism and subjectivity, frivolity, elitism, extravagance, decadence, hedonism, homoerotism, vice and even masochism and sodomy. It has been linked to homosexuality, not only because of the implications of its principles, but also because of the personal sexual tastes of some of its adherents. In an era of rigid moral values, rationalism and industralization, these post romantics were seen as aliens within their society. Somehow they were not accepted neither by an upper class influenced by double moral standards nor by the masses, due to the elititst chatacter of the movement.

But first of all, lets go to review what the aesthetic movement means. Most of definitions (i.e.Encyclopedia Britannica) agree on define aestheticism as "a late 19th-century European arts movement which centred on the doctrine that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve no political, didactic, or other purpose." It represents the British branch of the French symbolism or decadence, and dandyism, emerging as a reaction against the prevailing positivism, rationalism and utilitarism of the time, and emphasizing intuition over science.

Its philosophical foundations laid on Epicurus and in the German philosophical tradition represented by Kant, Schelling, Goethe, and Schiller. Epicurus, who was a Greek philosopher who found pleasure to be the highest good, influenced Walter Pater, who was the  English essayist who set the principles of the aesthetic movement. Immanuel Kant was a 18th century philosopher who postulated the autonomy of aesthetic standards, setting them apart from considerations of morality, utility, or pleasure. Aestheticism had its forerunners in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and among the Pre-Raphaelites. In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the movement were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music. It was the music that set the mood.

Aestheticism can be found in decorative arts and interior design in the forms of Anglo-Japanese style, ebonized wood, blue and white china, and nature motives; especially flowers, birds and feathers.


Hence, the concept of aesthetiscism should not be just confined as a mere theory of art, but as an approach to living itself. It emphasizes the beauty and the works of art over other aspects of life. Neither its representatives should be considered  simply as odd and refined homosexuals well educated at Oxford or Cambridge, but as men who loved beauty and expressed it through their art, tastes and passions, in a reaction against industralization, positivism and rationalism, and the progressive advance towards capitalism and consumerism. Consequently, since nowadays all these -isms yet prevail over art and beauty , aethetic values should remain and, indeed, whereas human beings can taste or feel, it will always be...

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