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Whether Gautier was the first to write those words, he was the first to adopt them as a slogan. "Art for art's sake" was a bohemian creed in the nineteenth century, a slogan raised in defiance of those who — from John Ruskin to the much later Communist advocates of socialist realism — thought that the value of art was to serve some moral or didactic purpose. Art for art's sake affirmed that art was valuable as art, that artistic pursuits were their own justification, and that art did not need moral justification — and indeed, was allowed to be morally subversive.
The slogan is associated in the history of English art and letters with Walter Pater, and his followers in the Aesthetic Movement, which was self-consciously in rebellion against Victorian moralism.
The LatinAlternative meanings: See Latin (disambiguation Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages are descended from Latin, and ma version of the slogan, "ars gratia artis", is used as a slogan by Metro-Goldwyn-MayerFor alternate meanings of "MGM", see MGM (disambiguation . Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM for short, is a large media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of cinema and television programs. Its principal subsidiaries are MGM (Metro-G, and appears in the oval around the roaring lion's head in their motion picture logo.