Art for Art’s Sake and Decadence
In defiance of society’s expectation that art should have usefulness and social value, French symbolist writers argue that art is supremely valuable because is has no goal beyond its own existence; it exists only to be beautiful: art for art’s sake.
The artist is a priest who renounces the practical and self-seeking concerns of ordinary existence in the service of what Flaubert and others called “the religion of beauty.”

The thoroughly Decadent writer cultivates high artifice in style and the bizarre in subject matter, recoils from the fertility and exuberance of instinctual and organic life, prefers elaborate dress over the living form and cosmetics over natural hue. Sometimes sets out to violate what is “natural” in human experience by resorting to drugs, depravity or sexual deviation in the attempt to achieve “the systematic derangement of all the senses” (Rimbaud).
Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.

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Wikipedia article on symbolism:
Symbolism (arts): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism_%28arts%29