History

Aestheticism gained noticeable popularity in the 1880s

•Followers called aesthetes

•Fin de siècle (late 19th century Britain) movement

Reactionary?

•Ideals of Victorian age (social code, religion, utilitarianism) replaced by Aesthetic ones

•Victorians believed art could be used as a tool for social education and moral enlightenment. Aesthetes wished to free art from this responsibility.

•Unashamed self-indulgence

Aestheticism in DG

•Values of Aestheticism symbolised by Lord Henry Wotton

•Morality and middle-class values of Victorian era, symbolised by Basil Hallward, are rejected by aesthetes

•Basil’s and Lord Henry’s influence on Dorian is the struggle between traditional Victorian Morality and Aestheticism

Beauty the chief pursuit of art and life

• Subjective view primary means of judging value (Individual taste - Can I find beauty in it?)

•Art of Art’s sake: independent of worldly issues, and appreciated for intrinsic value rather than for any moral purpose

•Nature is crude compared to Art (criticism of Romanticism)

•Art is not historical evidence

•Highly refined work which appealed to the senses

•Wilde: “Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life.”

Art is superior to life because life relies on   art as a means of finding expression and   beauty.

Lord Henry admires Dorian whose life becomes his artwork. Notion of Aestheticism as a lifestyle: Dorian aestheticizes his life. He lives in pursuit of pleasure and sensation. He fills his home with art. Dorian turns Sybil into an aesthetic object and takes pleasure in her dramatic and tragic death.

•Aesthetic lifestyle: exaggeration, fashion (Dandyism), alcohol, drugs, sexuality (homosexuality)

Aestheticism and Wilde’s Preface

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Pg 17.

Basil states: “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when mean treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”