ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -This short statement of Oscar Wilde in his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) expresses one of the central aspects of the idea of Art for Art’s Sake: art shall have no other aim than being art and it should be protected from subordination to any moral, didactic, social or political purpose.

Detailed explanation-2: -The Swiss writer Benjamin Constant is thought to have been the first person to use the phrase “art for art’s sake, ” in an 1804 diary entry. But the term is most often credited to the French philosopher Victor Cousin, who publicized it in his lectures of 1817-18.

Detailed explanation-3: -Oscar Wilde was strongly associated with the phrase “art for art’s sake, ” though it doesn’t actually appear in his writing. It stems from his role in the Aesthetics Movement, in which he advocated that art needed no justification or purpose.

Detailed explanation-4: -A slogan meaning that the beauty of the fine arts is reason enough for pursuing them-that art does not have to serve purposes taken from politics, religion, economics, and so on. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde argued for the doctrine of art for art’s sake.

Detailed explanation-5: -Wilde, not directly answering Clegg’s question, responded: “Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct or influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility.”