BAUDELAIRE AND THE PARADOX OF AESTHETIC MODERNITY

Baudelaire saw romanticism as the most contemporary expression of beauty
Beauty is only the promise of happiness.
Romanticism is a conception analogous to the morality of the period.
To speak of romanticisms is to speak of modern art - intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration toward the infinite
Romanticism is substantially different from everything htat has been done in the past - search for novelty
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.
Modernity cannot be compared to the past because what has survived from the past is only a variety of successive modernities.
There is not link between them so no comparison is possible and an artist cannot learn from the past.
Art ought to be modern
Nietzsche, History is an enemy of life.
Conflict between modernity and history - Baudelaire saw two beauties - eternal and modern
Beauty is something ardent and sad, a little vague, conveys a sense of strangeness, of mysterny.. And finally a sense of unhappiness. [53] Modernity is a spiritual adventure exploring the forbidden realm of evil
Modernity is a work of the imagination, antirealism
Artist's alienated from society.
Aristocratic in time of egalitarianism hostility toward a prevailing middle-class civilization with utilitarian and mercantile standards. [55]
About Edgar Poe (1852), Poe lamented lack of aristocracy in America, without it cult of Beautiful becomes corrupt
America as paradigm of bourgeois modernity.
Modern democracy as in America is triumph of the most natural and worst in man S
Baudelaire and science
Poetry and mathematics inherently related
"mechanical-scientific myth"
fascinated with urban modernity
Opposed not to civilization but to new wave of barbarism disguised as progressive modernity

THE IDEA OF MODERNITY