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SOPHIA (2010) 49:509519
DOI 10.1007/s11841-010-0215-3
Matthew Del Nevo
Published online: 3 December 2010# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract This paper will take up the work of Charles Baudelaire, poetic and critical, in order to present the Baudelairean aesthetic and to make a case for its relevance in our judgments about art today. Baudelaire was the first poet of the modern built environment and is known as the father of modern poetry. While his poetry is still admired, his aesthetic has been historicised: deemed to belong to that time and place in which Baudelaire wrote. This paper will argue that this historicisation by subsequent aesthetic theory and philosophy is a suppression of something integral to art and artists, without which art is liable to lose what is true about it and sink into a morass of irrelevance and triviality, or (as will be argued has partly happened) may become devoid of any value beyond the business interests that control it. In this regard, it will be suggested, Baudelaires aesthetic has important redeeming qualities.
Keywords Aesthetic theory. Baudelaire . Beauty. Critique
Baudelaire is commonly regarded as the father of modern poetry, and this is partly because he is the first truly urban poet, a poet of the built environment. There are aesthetic reasons as well, of course, which we shall come to shortly. Baudelaires major work, Les Fleurs du mal, appeared in 1857 when he was 36. There followed a public outcry, and Baudelaire was prosecuted by the civic authorities for outraging public decency. His work was offensive to public taste, and in this it is modern, as so much modern art, or at least so much avant garde modern art, tries to set new standards for taste, quite often by offending established taste; of course I realise that this situation is both complicated and normalised once it gets caught up with the politics of disestablishment as it did in the late 1960s.
In any case, the idea that art is a matter of taste is modern. For in sections eight and nine of the Critique of Judgement Kant (2000, 64-5) said (and the whole book backs up the thesis) that while the good is represented only by means of a concept,
M. Del Nevo (*)