1. Characteristics of Aestheticism
Reaction against
Realism, Didacticism, and Morality that characterised earlier and even concurrent cultural fashions
The monotony and vulgarity of bourgeois life
Belief in Art for Art’s Sake
Unconventional lifestyle
Appreciation of Beauty at the expense of utility and social value
Pursuit of Pleasure & Worship of the Senses (Hedonism)
Evocative Use of the language of senses
Excessive attention to the self
Typical representative: dandy see picture
Anti-Natural: belief in the ornate, extreme artifice, performance, and exotic
Walter Pater (theorist) :“to burn always like a hard gemlike flame”, filling each passing moment with intense experience, feeling all kinds of sensations

2. Aestheticism: places art above life holds that life should imitate art
not that art should
imitate life

3. “Art for art’s sake” in Wilde
“All art is quite useless” (Preface to DG)
Rejection of Victorian didacticism and realism
Wrote only to please himself
Moral imperative
Soul can be cured only by the senses only by “Art as the cult of beauty”
The artist: an alien in materialistic world
Superior being social outcast

4. Art for Art’s sake
This was one of the reactions against the materialism and commercialism of the Victorian industrial era, as well as a reaction against the Victorian convention of art for morality’s sake, or art for money’s sake.

5. Wilde’s dandy Aristocrat (vs. Bohemién)
Pursuit of pleasure Indulgence in the beautiful (language, clothes, food, boys…)
Elegance: symbol of spiritual superiority
Uses wit to shock (and criticize)
Individualist: absolute freedom

7. Credits www.sfu.ca/~ccolliga/Eng330--Wilde&Aestheticism.ppt
Spiazzi-Tavella, Now & Then, Zanichelli