Art is hard to nail down. The Latin “ars” is an art, a skill or a craft, so on the one hand it’s easy to see art as a human process. An “artifact” is something made – ie “factum” – by art. On the other hand, art as a human process leaves at least two groups disenfranchised.
First, those who see art in nature. Why, they ask, is the human element required? Second and closely related, those who see art as an end itself.
Unsurprisingly, these groups came together in the nineteenth century, that process whereby we changed ourselves into a citified and industrialised mass. They did so under many banners, one of which was “art for art’s sake”.
The expression first appeared in 1804 in the diary of Swiss thinker Benjamin Constant:
L’art pour l’art, sans but, car tout but dénature l’art.
That most modern artifactory Google translate does an excellent rendering, “Art for art’s sake, without purpose, because any purpose distorts art.”
Two 19th century artists who seized nature by the throat were Emily Bronte, died 19 December 1848, and JMW Turner, died 19 December 1851.
Henry Clay Frick was born between, on 19 December 1849. An industrialist and financier, his peers were Carnegie and Mellon. He was also a passionate art collector. Some four decades past I saw my first two Turners in the dim dining room of Frick’s mansion on Fifth Avenue and realised immediately why he has come to history as the painter of light.
The validity of the proposition art for art’s sake ran through that century. In 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche stated for the negative:
Art is the great stimulus to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as aimless, as l’art pour l’art?
Two years later, Oscar Wilde stated for the affirmative in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray:
All art is quite useless.
Not long after, Wilde went to chokey for gross indecency, a spectacular own goal arising from a run-in with the 9th Marquess of Queensberry.
When the House of Lords voted to legalise homosexual acts in 1967, the 12th Marquess voted in favour. In the latter’s spare time, he followed the art can be quite useful line, serving as Professor of Ceramics at the Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1983. The 12th Marquess was born on 19 December 1929.
