L'art Pour L'art

Art for art's sake—the usual English rendering of ''l'art pour l'art'' (), a French slogan from the latter part of the 19th century—is a phrase that expresses the philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only 'true' art, is divorced from any didactic, moral, political, or utilitarian function.Art for art's sake
(revised ed.). ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. 9992015. Such works are sometimes described as ''autotelic'' (from Greek: ''autoteles'', 'complete in itself'), a concept that has been expanded to embrace "inner-directed" or "self-motivated" human beings.

The term is sometimes used commercially. A Latin version of this phrase, ''ars gratia artis'' (), is used as a motto by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the film scroll around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in its iconic motion picture logo.

History

The original phrase "''l'art pour l'art''" ('art for art's sake') is credited to Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), who was the first to adopt it as a slogan in the preface to his 1835 book, ''Mademoiselle de Maupin''.

Gautier was not, however, the only one to write those words: they appear in the works of Victor Cousin, Benjamin Constant, and Edgar Allan Poe. For instance, Poe argues in his essay "The Poetic Principle" (1850):

We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake ... and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force:– but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

"Art for the sake of art" became a bohemian creed in the 19th century; a slogan raised in defiance of those—from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of socialist realism—who thought that the value of art was to serve some moral or didactic purpose. It was a rejection of the Marxist aim of politicising art. Art for the sake of art affirmed that art was valuable ''as'' art in itself; that artistic pursuits were their own justification; and that art did not need moral justification, and indeed, was allowed to be morally neutral or subversive.

As such, James McNeill Whistler wrote the following in which he discarded the accustomed role of art in the service of the state or official religion, which had adhered to its practice since the Counter-Reformation of the 16th century: "Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone...and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like." Such a brusque dismissal also expressed the artist's distancing of himself from sentimentalism. All that remains of Romanticism in this statement is the reliance on the artist's own eye and sensibility as the arbiter.

The explicit slogan is associated, in the history of English art and letters, with Walter Pater and his followers in the Aesthetic Movement, which was self-consciously in rebellion against Victorian moralism. It first appeared in English in two works published simultaneously in 1868: in Pater's review of William Morris's poetry in the ''Westminster Review'', and the other in ''William Blake'' by Algernon Charles Swinburne. A modified form of Pater's review appeared in his ''Studies in the History of the Renaissance'' (1873), one of the most influential texts of the Aesthetic Movement.

Arnold Bennett made a facetious