UNIT 1
The importance of being earnest
At the turn of the century artists, writers and playwrights were highly critical of Victorian achievements and beliefs. They mocked and challenged middle-class values, such as convention, respectability and the very notion of art, a classic example is Oscar Wilde´s play.
Wilde followed the Art for Art´s Sake doctrine: pursue fleeting beauty and pleasure as ends in themselves. Polished, impressionistic images that appealed to the senses and also a desire to shock and challenge values dominated the arts.
Although for many the Aesthetes descended into an excess of hedonism, emotional debauchery, degeneration and decadence, the movement served to disengage art from any purposeful meaning in society.
Yet from the 1880s to the start of WW1, the Aesthetic movement liberated art from pragmatism. Born in France with advocates such as poets Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, the Aesthetic movement was inspired by the philosophical views of Immanuel Kant inn relation to the aesthetics and the pleasure obtained from viewing a work of art. In this sense, Kant in Critique of Aesthetic Judgement argued that a pure aesthetic experience is the contemplation of an object that provokes pleasure for its own sake, with no other materialistic or utilitarian purposes. In other words, and this is a phrase that will accompany the movement, art is useless and therefore it should be contemplated for its value in terms of pleasure only.
Aesthetic values lived to the full brought about a different movement: the Decadent Movement.
More than a artistic movement as such, the Decadents followed a way of life based on the ideas of the Aesthetic movement. These were mainly the view that art is totally opposed to “nature” understood both in the biological sense of the word and in the “natural” norms of morality and sexual behaviour. Therefore the art of the Decadents was artificial and the decadence in their personal lives was expressed in the