Is there a notion less American than “art for art’s sake”? When we invoke the doctrine, we usually mean the exact opposite. In nine cases out of ten, when an American speaks of the essential role of art he means that it can be made to do something useful. The nineteenth century, with its didactic tableaux, esteemed art as an instrument of moral instruction. The twentieth century mocked this attitude, even as it justified its own artistic products for their “consciousness-raising” properties. In either case, art is justified by what it does, rather than what it is.
Perhaps this is inevitable in a culture with an inherited Puritan ambivalence about the frank acceptance of pleasure, aesthetic or otherwise. And the doctrine of art for art’s sake is nothing if not a doctrine of pleasure. All it asks of art is that it arouse in us a sensation of palpable pleasure: by its tactile and physical properties, by the sheer and ineffable gorgeousness of viscous color. Such a doctrine, quite understandably, has never taken deep root in America. There has been the odd exception, but generally speaking sensuous visual art, like sensuous food, remains a foreign import.
The impulse to find a moral allegory in any given text is a deeply innate American habit of mind.
It is therefore fitting that our most successful artistic movement, in terms of popularity, should have been the most didactic of all, the Hudson River School. Its chief insight was that
