Art for art’s sake

This became a popular slogan among French writers and artists during the 19th century before it was later adopted in English. Perhaps the most well-known example of it is the Latinised version Ars Gratia Artis, which first appeared in the MGM lion logo in 1917. The original French L’Art pour l’Art is often wrongly attributed to Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) but he only popularised the phrase, which was originally coined by the French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1867) where it appears in his Cours de Philosophie (1818) as “We need religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, art for art’s sake.”