Christa Giles

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importance of the arts while connecting these ideas with
the problem of identity.
The perception of art as autonomous and ideal
resulted in the bifurcation between art and life which was
expressed in their work as irresolvable paradoxes. Thus
beauty, identified with consciously created artifice, was
inextricably bound to death; and therefore the painted
mask only partially concealed decay and ultimately
perhaps even nothingness. The obsession with art’s
hermeticism resulted in their insistence on the primacy of
form, their concern with style and structure above and
beyond content – a concern which would later lead to
abstraction. The dandy is the logical embodiment of such
concepts. Impassive, controlled, every detail of his
appearance conducing to a complex whole, he was the
incarnation of the triumph of form over matter. The cult of
the artificial became not only a means of improving upon
nature, but also of implicitly juxtaposing an inadequate and
banal reality with one transformed by the powers of the
imagination. The ugly, bizarre, perverse could therefore
become beautiful when the controlling structure, the form,
with artifice as its agency transmuted it into art.