Art for Art’s Sake

Art for Art’s Sake

I am fed up to the back teeth with this slogan. It may have once seemed brave and insightful, but now it reveals a complete failure of moral judgment (and intelligence). It is the opposite of the truth. First, let’s parse it, because it conceals a slyly tendentious ambiguity. It clearly means “The purpose of art is art” (art is autotelic, in the lingo). Equally clearly it is intended as a normative statement not a descriptive one: it doesn’t say that all art is actually done for itself, but rather that this is how art ought to be. There would be no point in saying it if artists already conformed to it. It is presupposing that many artists don’t proceed according to its prescription, but they should. And what is that they do so faultily? They treat art as a means to a moral end: they think the purpose of art is promoting the good—the moral good. So, the proponent of the autotelic view is saying that art is an end in itself not a means of making the world a better place. We can agree that the artist is doing art not morality—he is an artist, after all—but the slogan is urging artists to do only this: to have no moral intentions, to advance no moral cause. The artist is concerned solely and wholly with non-moral objectives—say, aesthetic experience or emotional response. Of course, the artist has artistic intentions, but we are being told that he should have no other intentions. So, the slogan becomes “The purpose of art is only art, not morality”. It is like saying “The purpose of art is only art, not brick laying”. Morality is extrinsic to the work of art. No novel, say, should concern itself with moral themes, with good and evil, on pain of not being art (or artistic). You disqualify yourself as an artist by building moral content into your work. Perhaps the reader can now see why I am fed up to the back teeth with this slogan; it is patent nonsense, pure rubbish. All art has, or should have, moral content, especially the written kind: it is concerned with good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong. It would have no human interest if it were not. Of course, it should not be inartistically concerned with such themes, but it is not a condition on being art that it not be concerned with them (pace Oscar Wilde and Vladimir Nabokov). Nor should it be concerned didactically to support received morality, conventional bourgeois morality; and in fact, art frequently makes a point of criticizing such morality. It would be absurd to announce that the purpose of art is only morality, but it clearly is a concern of the artist. Why would anyone want to deny this?

Compare science: “Science for science’s sake”. Suppose we paraphrase this as “The sole purpose of science is science—and certainly not the promotion of the good”. That is, we insist that science (the institution) is concerned only with scientific standards: truth, evidence, theoretical interest, and nothing else. This is obviously not so: we have pure science and applied science, and applied science is often concerned with human (and animal) welfare (medical science). Why would we want to preclude the scientist from having moral concerns, such as the desire to cure cancer—would this make him a bad scientist?  This is palpable rubbish, is it not? The scientist is quite capable of having several distinct aims at the same time: achieving scientific truth, improving the lot of mankind, earning a living, impressing his colleagues, etc. He presumably also believes that scientific truth is itself an intrinsic good, so to that extent is enmeshed in normative notions—as is also true of the value of artistic good (beauty is a good). The moral aims have to be the right ones, naturally, but assuming they are, there is no discredit to the scientist in pursuing them. He might well be criticized for not pursuing them. There is no incompatibility between science and morality, as there is no incompatibility between art and morality. Indeed, morally bad science should not be undertaken, as morally bad art should not be. We can make the same point with respect to many human activities: history, philosophy, psychology, economics, politics, mathematics, cookery, entertainment, education, etc. Try substituting these into the slogan and see if you like the result: for example, “Philosophy for philosophy’s sake, not for goodness’s sake”. Should philosophy never be concerned with morality—is ethics not part of its remit? It can be concerned with other things too, as art can also be. The right thing to say is that art is properly concerned with beauty, truth, and goodness; they are all part of its plural purpose. In this it is like many other human activities. It is quite wrong to maintain that art is only about aesthetic thrills (Nabokov) or pleasure (Wilde). A novel, say, is generally about all these things, with morality surely at the center; some novels are clearly intended to make a specific moral point, and are no less artistic for that (e.g., Black Beauty). Contrary to what its author insists, Lolita is in fact a deeply moral novel and gains much of its aesthetic impact from that fact. How could a novel not be occupied with morality, since it concerns human action, into which morality is woven. Drama is about good and evil, and drama is the point of a great deal of art.

It is hard not to see the autotelic view of art as reflecting a general cynicism about morality and wanting to protect art from the taint of the moral. If morality is subjective, relative, shapeless, and conventional, we won’t want it infecting the artistic work; but that sophomoric position is hardly compulsory (in fact, it is ridiculous). Sound morality elevates the novel (as in the work of Jane Austen, among many others). It is interesting that the form of our slogan is correct only for morality: “Morality for morality’s sake, not for money’s sake or power’s sake”. The only purpose of morality is to secure morally right conduct, however that may be defined—doesn’t that sound eminently reasonable? The novel should be proud to contain a large helping of morality; we expect nothing less. Morality isn’t the opposite of art but its backbone. It may well be true of music, painting, and dance that they have little or nothing to do with morality; but they are the exceptions that prove the rule, since they are not narrative forms. The ear and eye can be aesthetically stimulated by these art forms without any moral thoughts flowing through the mind of the observer, but the same is not true of narrative art—i.e., stories. If someone asserted “Stories for stories’ sake, only”, we would recoil in disbelief. The original slogan possesses what prima facie plausibility it does by suggesting non-narrative art, but narrative art is transparently morally imbued. And it is surely a wild exaggeration to try to assimilate narrative art to music, painting, and dance—as if we are responding to what our eyes present to us in reading a book. It is true that the written word can possess internal artistic features, but the novel is not about such features—and we surely don’t want to suggest that the novel is only artistic in virtue of such features. Sometimes the moral shape of a novel is the main part of its artistic appeal.[1]

[1] I rattle on about these themes in Ethics, Evil and Fiction and Shakespeare’s Philosophy. I know for a fact that I had covert moral intentions in writing my two novels, Bad Patches and The Space Trap, as well as narrowly artistic intentions. Wilde and Nabokov were stern moralists, if very funny and artistic ones.