A Latin version of this phrase, ars gratia artis (Classical Latin: [ˈars ˈɡraːtiaː ˈartɪs]), is used as a motto by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio, appearing in the film scroll around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in its logo.
[citation needed] James McNeill Whistler wrote the following, deprecating the accustomed role of art in the service of the state or official religion, as had been common practice since the Counter-Reformation of the 16th century: "Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone...and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like.
In English art and letters, the slogan is associated with Walter Pater and his Aesthetic Movement, which self-consciously rebelled against Victorian moralism.
"[5] A modified form of Pater's review appeared in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), one of the most influential texts of the Aesthetic Movement.
[6] Arnold Bennett made the facetious riposte: "Am I to sit still and see other fellows pocketing two guineas apiece for stories which I can do better myself?
He was inspired mainly by Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists whom he had met in Paris, where he was friends with Albert Saint-Paul and consorted with the circle around Stéphane Mallarmé.
She asserted that artists had a "duty to find an adequate expression to convey it to as many souls as possible," ensuring that their works were accessible enough to be appreciated.
[12] Senegalese president, head of the Socialist Party of Senegal, and co-founder of Negritude, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and anti-colonial Africanist writer Chinua Achebe have both criticised the slogan as being a limited and Eurocentric view on art and creation.
"[14] Walter Benjamin, one of the developers of Marxist hermeneutics,[15] discusses the slogan in his seminal 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
He first mentions it in regard to the reaction within the realm of traditional art to innovations in reproduction, in particular photography.
One of the slogans of the Futurists was "Fiat ars – pereat mundus" ('Let art be created, though the world perish').