Aesthetic autonomy, the idea that art should exist for its own sake rather than for moral, political, or social utility, became a central tenet of late nineteenth-century Decadence. Figures like Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde argued that the value of an artwork resides in its formal perfection and the intensity of the sensation it provokes, not in any external lesson it might impart. This stance was a direct challenge to the Victorian expectation that literature should provide moral instruction. However, the rise of the historical avant-garde in the early twentieth century sought to shatter this autonomy by reintegrating art into the praxis of life. Movements such as Dada and Surrealism viewed aesthetic distance as a bourgeois luxury that insulated art from the urgent political upheavals of the time. They utilized shock and subversion to force the viewer to confront the absurdity of institutionalized culture. Thus, the history of modern art can be seen as a dialectical struggle between the desire for pure aesthetic experience and the impulse to make art an instrument of radical social transformation.