One of the problems I have with teaching Art is that those who write the standards and curriculum emphasize the "functional" aspects of Art: How art confronts social, political, and economic issues, How Art records history, etc... While such issues might be central to why some create Art... and it seems such socio-political functions are more important than aesthetic concerns to many contemporary artists, critics, and theorists... I have never fallen into that aesthetic view.
In studying Art Criticism, it is generally suggested that there are four main Art Critical Theories upon which Art is judged: Realism or Immitationalism, Expressionism or Emotionalism, Functionalism, and Formalism or Aestheticism. While I have long employed a good deal of "realist" techniques... I abandoned the notion that the most important measure of Art was the illusion of visual realism long ago. I don't think I ever embraced the notion of Functionalism... ascribing a purpose such as conveying a political or religious point of view as central to one's Art. When I was younger, I would have thought of myself as something of an Expressionist out to convey my emotions through my Art. Over the years, I moved further and further toward Formalism or Aestheticism. This was likely due a good deal to the literature I read... many of the so-called Formalists or Aesthticists:
Théophile Gautier (who coined the tern
l'art pour l'art or "Art for art's sake")
Leconte de Lisle
J.K. Huysmans
Edmond & Jules de Goncourt
José-Maria de Heredia
Edgar Allen Poe
Oscar Wilde
Walter Pater
Charles Baudelaire
Paul Verlaine
Arthur Rimbaud
Stéphane Mallarmé
Paul Valéry
Pierre Louÿs
The Preface to Oscar Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray is probably the best and most succinct expression of the Formalist concept of Art:
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.
This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.
For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban
seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,
but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything.
Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies.
An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid.
The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
But the Formalist/Aesthticist theory of Art goes far back:
"Art has no end but its own perfection." -Plutarch
"Nothing is more useful to man than those arts which have no utility."-Ovid
I like Stéphane Mallarmé's undermining of the importance of the functionality or utilitarianism of art when he pointed out that the most utilitarian room in our home is the toilet.