Art for art's sake

Art for art's sake—the usual English rendering of l'art pour l'art (laʁ puʁ laʁ), a French slogan from the latter half of the 19th century—is a phrase that expresses the philosophy that 'true' art is utterly independent of any and all social values and utilitarian function, be that didactic, moral, or political. Such works are sometimes described as autotelic (from Greek: autoteles, 'complete in itself'), a concept that has been expanded to embrace "inner-directed" or "self-motivated" human beings. The term is sometimes used commercially. A Latin version of this phrase, ars gratia artis (ˈars ˈɡraːtiaː ˈartɪs), is used as a motto by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the film scroll around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in its iconic motion picture logo. The phrase "l'art pour l'art" ('art for art's sake') had been floating around the intellectual circles of Paris since the beginning of the 19th century, but it was Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), who first fully articulated its metaphysical meaning (as we now understand it) in the prefaces of his 1832 poetry volume Albertus, and 1835 novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin. Gautier was not the first nor the only one to use that phrase: it appeared in the lectures and writings of Victor Cousin and Benjamin Constant. In his essay "The Poetic Principle" (1850) Edgar Allan Poe argues: We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake ... and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force:– but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.