"Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live"
About this Quote
A bracingly selfish definition of art: not beauty, not morality, not even truth, but appetite. When Remy de Gourmont says art is "everything that stimulates the desire to live", he drags aesthetics out of the museum and back into the bloodstream. The verb matters. "Stimulates" suggests a nervous system, a jolt, an erotic charge. Art isn’t a halo; it’s a catalyst. If it doesn’t make you want more life, it’s failed on the only metric that counts.
The subtext is a quiet revolt against the 19th century’s pious habit of treating art as uplift or instruction. Gourmont, a Symbolist-adjacent novelist and critic working in fin-de-siecle France, lived amid a culture obsessed with decadence and decline: the sense that modernity was both intoxicating and rotten. In that atmosphere, "desire to live" reads like a counterspell. He’s not denying death or boredom; he’s proposing art as an antidote to them, something closer to medicine than sermon.
The sly part is the word "everything". It blows up the boundary between "high" art and whatever actually keeps people going: a novel, yes, but also a melody, a room, a certain face in a crowd, the ritual of a cafe. Gourmont’s intent isn’t to flatten art into mere entertainment; it’s to indict any aesthetic that prizes refinement over vitality. The standard becomes visceral: does it enlarge your hunger for experience, or does it train you to admire life from a safe distance?
The subtext is a quiet revolt against the 19th century’s pious habit of treating art as uplift or instruction. Gourmont, a Symbolist-adjacent novelist and critic working in fin-de-siecle France, lived amid a culture obsessed with decadence and decline: the sense that modernity was both intoxicating and rotten. In that atmosphere, "desire to live" reads like a counterspell. He’s not denying death or boredom; he’s proposing art as an antidote to them, something closer to medicine than sermon.
The sly part is the word "everything". It blows up the boundary between "high" art and whatever actually keeps people going: a novel, yes, but also a melody, a room, a certain face in a crowd, the ritual of a cafe. Gourmont’s intent isn’t to flatten art into mere entertainment; it’s to indict any aesthetic that prizes refinement over vitality. The standard becomes visceral: does it enlarge your hunger for experience, or does it train you to admire life from a safe distance?
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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