Origin and essence of the theory "art for art's sake"

The theory of "Art for Art's Sake" has been around for more than a century, but the questions it raises and the struggles that surround it have perhaps never been as decisive for the development of art as they are today. What is the essence of art? Should it serve something other than itself? Is "pure beauty" not its only goal, or, in order to acquire social significance, must it submit to the great moral tasks that society sets for it? What is the role of the artist: to become the creator of autonomous artistic values ​​that will be enjoyed by a small elite of spiritual aristocrats, or to be in the vanguard of the great battle for social renewal? The theory of "Art for Art's Sake" has its answers to these fateful questions, and these answers lie at the foundation of the formalist art of the bourgeois world, as it has developed from the last century to the present day. Therefore, to describe the socio-psychological atmosphere in which this aesthetic concept was formed, to reveal its social and theoretical essence, to indicate the problems it posed and solved, and to assess them both in the context of the relevant historical situation and in view of contemporary requirements, is undoubtedly a topical task that our aesthetics and art studies cannot and should not ignore. The present article is an attempt in this regard. It sets itself limited requirements: to examine the theory of "Art for Art's Sake" as it developed in France - its true homeland - and only within the framework of that generation of writers and artists who first gave it the appearance of a specific aesthetic doctrine and first used it as a weapon, or more precisely, as a cover for their hatred of bourgeois society and culture. The representatives of this generation did not form a single school. These were artists, different in temperament, inclinations and tastes, different in the nature of their work and therefore different in their place in the history of new art. What united them was their common understanding of art and its tasks, of its relation to morality, politics, religion, science, nature, to reality in general. This understanding was not the result of a strictly thought-out theoretical work.