Walter Pater/ "The Renaissance"/Aestheticism/Decadence

Aestheticism, Decadence, Symbolism (inspired by Baudelaire)

– celebrates the pursuit of sensual pleasure
-art for arts sake, not to better society
– Cult of Beauty: anti-utilitarian
– elevates art to the status of religions
– art’s responsibility is beauty, subject matter irrelevant
– escape the stifling constraints of the Victorian society
-critique of the spiritually empty industrial/modern society
-loss of the natural order of things

“to fall away”
– artificiality, perversity, depravity, decay, langorous debauchery
– self consciousness, refinement
-synaesthesia
– sought to elevate the things deemed negative (death/decay)
– celebrate the abnormal/grotesque
– extreme refinement of sensibility/aestheticism

The habit of the crowd flattens them

*Beauty*
-more emphasis on what we experience, less emphasis on trying to categorize beauty – no formula
– perhaps beauty itself is eternal, but the form it takes is not
-fleeting, transient