Reading "art for art’s sake": Western modernism and its discontents in the South Asian art world

Document Type

Article

Department

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Abstract

This essay traces how the idea of “art for art’s sake” shifted as it moved from late nineteenth and early twentieth century European debates into the artistic worlds of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. It argues that the concept was never universal, but emerged from specific European conditions described by thinkers such as Gautier, Bürger, and Greenberg. When this vocabulary entered British art education in India, it arrived without the institutions that had originally sustained it. As writers like Guha-Thakurta and Mitter show, academic training in colonial schools turned autonomy into an administrative rule that privileged European methods and framed local practices as secondary.

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Publication (Name of Journal)

Tehzib: Undergraduate Research Journal

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