A Great Purpose Uncovered
Ever since I was born, people have been asking me about purpose. What my purpose was for reading a certain book, for drawing something, for what I like and what I dislike, for what I watch, for every action in my life.
Purpose, to me, has always been heavy. It has weighed on my mind, making me question everything we do, every piece of literature written, every artwork created, every action carried out.
So, when I heard about Aestheticism in my 10th grade English Honors class, I was immediately intrigued. Aestheticism was a nineteenth-century arts movement which argued that art exists for the sake of its beauty alone and did not need to serve any other purpose. It was so different from everything that I’d been taught my whole life. For once, people purposely did not want purpose. They wanted to enjoy something because it was enjoyable.
That night, I went home and searched up all I could on Aestheticism. I felt liberated, not because I necessarily agreed with l’art pour l’art, but because it was comforting to know that not everything needed an answer. It was exhilarating.
In senior year of high school, my art teacher told us we would be spending the year creating an art portfolio. I knew I would be able to apply the Aestheticism concepts of purposelessness for beauty into my art. The official theme for my portfolio was growth—the never-ending growth of tangibles in our world, inspired by the greater never-ending growth of intangibles in our minds.
When I started the first piece for my portfolio, my friend looked at it, furrowing her eyebrows. “I don’t get it.”
I smiled and shrugged.
Ever since learning about Aestheticism, I’ve seen the world in a new light, from a new perspective. It has given me a hope—and an expectation really—that there is so much more to the world that I haven’t uncovered. I crave that feeling of my mind being enlightened, a natural high from gaining knowledge. Or, as my favorite author, Oscar Wilde, put it, in the context of looking at a woodland painting, “[F]or the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for and always missed.”
Cover Photo by dailyartmagazine. Edited by Madison Case.
