Aestheticism

Aestheticism is a bourgeois literary and artistic trend popular in Western Europe at the end of the 19th century. It originally originated in the poetry world, and later gradually spread to novels and dramas, and was mainly popular in Britain. The so-called "aestheticism" is an artistic proposition that takes the formal beauty of art as absolute beauty. The "beauty" mentioned here refers to the technical beauty that is divorced from reality. Therefore, aestheticism is sometimes also called "aestheticism" or "beauty supremacy".

The formation of aestheticism has a long process. Keats, the British Romantic poet in the 1830s, was the pioneer of the aestheticism movement. He said: "Beautiful things are eternal joy." The French writer Gautier is a writer who made the transition from romanticism to aestheticism. He opposed utilitarianism in art, advocated pure art, pursued formal beauty, and proposed "art for art's sake". Gautier became an advocate of the aestheticism movement.

The formation of the British aestheticism movement at the end of the 19th century had two major elements: one was the hedonistic criticism of Bede (1839-1894); the other was the life of Morris (1834-1896) Artistic thinking. Bede believes that the responsibility of a literary critic is not to master knowledge and list materials to meet the correct definition of beauty, but to have a special temperament, the ability to feel beautiful objects, and to closely connect oneself with the content of the book. , the pleasure and fun gained from exploring it, this is the foundation of aesthetic criticism. Morris believes that the purpose of transforming society is to extend freely, which must make daily life artistic. If any civilized society cannot provide this kind of environment for its members, then there is no need for the world to exist. The above views of Bede and Morris laid the theoretical foundation of aestheticism. Coupled with the efforts of Rossetti (1828-1882) and Swinburne (1837-1909), the main representatives of the Pre-Raphaelites in the British poetry circle, the aestheticism movement was finally formed.

The true representative of aestheticism is Oscar Wilde (1856-1900). He is a practitioner of aestheticism creation and an advocate of aestheticism theory.

Regarding the relationship between art and reality, Oscar Wilde believed that art should be detached from reality and free from life. "Real events are the enemies of art. The disadvantages of all art arise from the real sense. Nature means understanding, and understanding is not art." All poor art arises from the description of returning to nature and describing life objectively. Therefore, it is believed that all art that "returns to life and nature" is bad. The farther art is from reality and detached from reality, the better? "The only beautiful things are things that have nothing to do with us."

Just As for the role of art in life, Wilde believed that it is not art that reproduces life, but that life imitates art. Art is not a mirror of human social life. Life is just a student of art. This fundamentally denies society. The materialist view that the objective existence of people determines people's ideology falls into an epistemology that puts the cart before the horse.

In terms of the purpose of literary and artistic creation, he advocates "art for art's sake". It expresses nothing but itself. "Art has an independent life, just as thought has an independent life." It goes without saying that these literary and artistic ideas spread by Wilde are extremely absurd. He reversed the relationship between literature and art and life, confused people's cognitive lines, and attempted to induce The writer penetrates into the "Ivory Tower" of bourgeois art to save the inevitable decline of the bourgeoisie.

The novel "The Portrait of Dulliangley" is Oscar Wilde's masterpiece, and it is also an aestheticism that aims to illustrate that life is art. Imitation destroys art and human life ceases to exist.

The trend of aestheticism had a great influence on our country's literary world. In the 1930s, it flowed into our country, and the "Crescent School" scholar Xu Zhimo's poems clearly contain aestheticism, which was severely criticized by the great Chinese writer Lu Xun.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said: Perfectionism equals paralysis - a very insightful explanation of perfection. The harm of perfectionists. Perfectionists in psychology are those who set personal standards too high, are unrealistic, and have obvious obsessive tendencies, requiring themselves to achieve impossible ideals. people.