Kant and “Art for Art’s Sake”
The beautiful, for Kant, is “that which without any concept is cognitized as the object of necessary satisfaction.” The status of aesthetic judgment is not empirical but logical, based upon the powers of human reason and rationality, which excludes internal and external purposiveness. Kant introduces purposiveness without a purpose, allowing the mind of the one who contemplates art free, unrestricted play of the mental faculties. Within the Romantic movement, artists were believed to have the right to exist for the sole purpose of making art and art supposedly existed for the sole purpose of being art. Art for art’s sake is such a powerful (and necessary) concept, so pervasive and entrenched that it is one of the most important motivating forces behind art to this day. With the initiation of “art for art’s sake,” a phrase coined, perhaps by Benjamin Constant, in response to or as a definition of Kant’s ideas, the artist and the work of art now had a purpose again—not a social purpose but a purpose that was strictly an art purpose. Confronting the staid and serious Neoclassic was its rival “ism”, Romanticism, which championed the artist as a genius and art as an expression of that genius—concepts that were pure Kant.
“Art for art’s sake” is a particular concept developed within the branch of philosophy called Aesthetics. These terms: “art for art’s sake,” “aestheticism” and “aesthetics” are not interchangeable. Also not to be confused with Kantian aesthetic theory is Aestheticism, which was an artistic movement in late Nineteenth Century England. English Aestheticism was an attitude on the part of art makers and art appreciators, based upon the desire to make every object “artful” and beautiful, regardless of its utilitarian or use value. Late Nineteenth Century Aestheticism was a desire to combine art and life and life and beauty. “Art for art’s sake” was an aspect of aesthetics, a Kantian derived concept, completely divorced from any specific work of art or from any particular art movement. The independence of aesthetics from art is best illustrated when we picture Kant, an elderly and retiring philosopher professor who denied himself all sensual pleasures in his pursuit of the intellect. Living in a backwater university town, he never went to museums and did not own any art, and yet he was able to reason his way to the solution of grounding the response to art, which is personal and therefore subjective (based in the viewing subject) in an intellectual framework that is impersonal and objective.
The intellectual framework devised by Kant is aesthetics or the grounds for the definition of art. Kant set art free from content, subject matter, the client’s wishes, the community’s desires and the needs of religion. The idea of art being given wholly over to aesthetic pleasure and delight was the ultimate freedom of art to exist on its own merits and to be the center of its own world. Art lived and died by its own art rules and justified its own existence in terms of its separate universe. Art was autonomous and free. Kant’s ahistorical or transcendental ideas did not go unnoticed, and they were conveyed by German expatriates to post-Revolution French intellectuals and artists, who were increasingly alienated from society and adrift without the traditional patrons of Church and State. Suddenly socially “useless” without their historical missions, certain artists found Kant’s concepts very appealing and timely.
The Critique of Judgment (1790) contained the right ideas at the right time: ideas, which were a fortuitous response to an artistic crisis. What does an artist do? How does an artist make art and why? Why is it that certain objects are universally called “art?” What are the common characteristics of these objects? What is their “art-ness?” Kant’s answers came, by the 20th century, to be commonly called formalism. Attention to Form in Kantian philosophy, or art for art’s sake, separates art from its traditional role as purveyor of subject matter on the command of a patron. But there is a difference between what Kant wrote and what his followers made of his ideas. For Kant, formalism is a mode of apprehending and emphasizes direct experience or intuitional awareness, without consideration of practical implications, of a work of art. The cultivation of aesthetic experience as a deliberate value was the work of Kant, who developed critical criterion for the aptness of a work of art for appreciation, based upon its formal properties, rather than upon practical significance or importance of subject matter.
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Tags: aesthetics, art-for-art's sake, Benjamin Constant, Critique of Judgment, Emmanuel Kant, formalism, Romanticism