FOF, F. and LING, K. (2021). The case for Aestheticism: Diving into Censorship and Artistic Expression. Journal of Literary Ethics and Morality.

[15:49, 9/23/2021] Aestheticism does not pander to society's standards of what is moral or immoral. It is the appreciation of art for its Beauty. To tie the case for aestheticism is to argue for the separation of art from morality, and only the morally weak people would be influenced by immoral art, instead of admiring Art for Art's own Beauty and its lessons.

Mainstream Victorian culture saw art and literature as a means of self-improvement or a spur to good works. Swinburne’s poetry instead presented readers with moral ambiguity and provided them no comfortable psychological position.

The movement against aestheticism can be said to primarily stem from the concern regarding the educational values of Art that are ingrained in society (e.g. depiction of violence, romanticizing immoral acts); creating a juxtaposition/intertwining of Beauty and immoral or "dirty" Art is unnatural as it disrupts the developmental thoughts of those who are still formulating their sense of morality (a group that is more easily influenced, like children!). The argument for this particular case only grows exponentially as it becomes especially true in the society of the 21st-century, where Art evolves into a more immersive and indistinguishable experience from the actual realities of morality in the world. Today, the visual impact of Television series, Games, and virtual reality focuses on creating their own systems of law and their own moral realities, and, coupled with the immersive effects, can be seen to be detrimental to the formulation of healthy moralities as worldbuilding imitates reality in a hyper-realistic and persuasive/believable manner. For example, a popular gaming strategy involves the violence of rapidly killing players to advance in the game; such behaviour is rewarded by the instant gratification of in-game currencies/coins. This so-called alt-education presented within in-game realities perpetuates an attitude that works towards moral ambiguity/arbitrariness—contributing to the moral argument against aestheticism. The emphasis on the powerful influence of Aesthetic art can be tied to the social learning theory of the Bobo doll experiment (or experiments) which is the collective name for a series of experiments performed by psychologist Albert Bandura. In short, he found out that the children exposed to aggressive depictions on television were more likely to pursue physically aggressive behavior than those who were not exposed to it. In the field of immersive Art today whereby information is quickly processed and indistinguishable from reality, we can argue that many media firms/corporations have learned to exploit (and condition) the subconscious by equipping Aesthetic art in a pretty Trojan horse strategy to draw in consumers.

On the other hand, it is important to note that several Anti-aesthetes in power are mostly taking the moral and educational characteristics of the art into consideration without acknowledging the issues of censorship in general. 醉翁之意不在酒: Some of them are not opposed to the idea of aestheticism in itself, but they are creating a strawman because the effects of aestheticism (attaching beauty to unconventional, questionable morals) indirectly endangers the position of their power, because such Art provides a platform to challenge the roots of the very "moral laws and realities" that People in power are still feeding the masses

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/aestheticism-and-decadence

META is a thing now