Love Quote by Remy de Gourmont

De Gourmont is doing what fin-de-siecle writers did best: turning culture into a confession booth and insisting the real priest is desire. His provocation hinges on a slippery chain reaction - aesthetic emotion as a kind of vestibule, priming the body for erotic feeling. Art, in this framing, isn’t a lofty alternative to appetite; it’s appetite with better lighting. The sting is in “accomplice,” a word that drags the museum into the alleyway. Art doesn’t merely depict love; it conspires with it, smuggling sensation past the mind’s censors.

The specific intent is polemical: to demote “pure” aesthetics and reattach art to the nervous system. De Gourmont was writing in a moment when Symbolists and Decadents prized suggestion over statement, perfume over proof. His line reads like a manifesto against bourgeois moral bookkeeping - the idea that art can be elevated, hygienic, and disinterested. Subtextually, he’s also flattering the reader’s self-image: if you respond intensely to art, you’re not frivolous; you’re exquisitely alive. That’s a seductive argument in itself.

The final claim, “Take love away and there is no longer art,” is intentionally absolutist. It’s less a falsifiable thesis than a pressure test: can you name a work that doesn’t, at some level, orbit longing, attachment, jealousy, devotion, or their negative spaces? Even “cold” art becomes a performance of distance from feeling - which is still a relationship to it. De Gourmont makes aesthetics look like sublimated eroticism, and he does it with the cool certainty of someone trying to scandalize piety into honesty.