Aestheticism and Decadence: A Journey Through Art and Rebellion

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What is the relationship between Aestheticism and Bourgeois Life?

The Aesthetic poets embodied his protest against the monotony and vulgarity of bourgeois life, leading an unconventional existence, pursuing sensation and excess, cultivating art and beauty.
The task of the artist was to Philosophically, Aesthetics think that nobody can really understand all the truth and virtues since no one can go further the sensitive reality and every knowledge is partial. So, intuitions sometimes are more reliable than rationality.

Aesthetic Isolation and Art for Art's Sake

The French artists withdrew from the political and social scene and "escaped" into aesthetic isolation, into what Gautier defined " art pour l'art ".

This concept, which in English was translated in “Art for Art’s Sake” was developed by Oscar Wilde in the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In this part of the romance it is said that the artist is the creator of beautiful things and, therefore, when someone critics such wonder it means that they are corrupted because beauty only generates beauty. As a matter of fact, morality is detached from literary works, which are or well written or mediocre, and its only principle to follow is the one the leads to the perfect use of the imperfect tools of the writer.

For this reason, Art can describe everything but it is useless practically because if it focuses on reality and daily life it will ruin its essence. So the only thing that can be done with Art is to admire profoundly it and let it explore its progresses with its own time.

Decadentism and Rejection of Reality

Decadentism is originated from Aestheticism and flourished, in Europe, between 1880-1890 against Naturalism and the new development of the scientific method. It was marked by a sort of extremism. The decadents disregarded the simple genuine values of life and were against mediocrity; so they cut themselves off the masses.

They refused any contact with reality and looked for an escape not in Nature, but within themselves and, they looked for what, the great French poet C. Baudelaire called the “paradis artificiels”. In other words they looked for illusion, because illusion was perfect and could replace reality, which is, on the contrary, imperfect.

As a matter of fact, critics uses this term negatively in order to describe the so called "Poètes maudits" who loved to create scandals with their wild lives (like Verlaine, Rimbaud, Corbière, Mallarmé) but also it was referred positively to a new way of thinking that is alienated from the bourgeoises.