Art for Art's sake...resource question?

Question

Theophile Gautier is generally credited as being the first to use the phrase" Art for Art's sake" as a slogan which is often associated with the aesthetic and decadent movement. Does anyone know why he is credited with this, or what resource this comes from?

By the way, I'm not infering that he invented the phrase, I just want to know where he first used the phrase as a slogan.

Answer 1

"L'art pour l'art" (translated as "art for art's sake") is indeed credited to Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). Gautier was the first to adopt the phrase as a slogan. "Art for art's sake" was a bohemian creed in the nineteenth century, a slogan raised in defiance of those who — from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of socialist realism — thought that the value of art was to serve some moral or didactic purpose. "Art for art's sake" affirmed that art was valuable as art, that artistic pursuits were their own justification and that art did not need moral justification — and indeed, was allowed to be 'morally subversive'.

Amusingly, in true presumptive Hollywood style, an attempt at a Latin version of the slogan, "ars gratia artis", is used as a slogan by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the oval around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in their motion picture logo.