Baudelaire Flashcards
What kind of beauty is wrong to neglect?
Particular beauty, such as seen in minor artists.
What value does representation of the present hold?
Its beauty, but also its essential quality of being present, much like work from the past is valued for its historical value. Works of art capture that moral and aethetic beauty of their time.
What does he say about an impartial student studying French costume through the ages?
There would be no gap in the transitions and no surprises. What profound harmony controls all the components of history. The immortal thirst for beauty has always been satisfied.
What two elements is beauty made of?
An eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumtantial element, severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, and its morals: the icing on the divine cake.
What does Baudelaire say genius is?
Childhood recovered at will. Children have a high capacity to interest themselves in things. They see everything in a state of newness - always drunk. Nothing is stale. Genius is when a grown up can harness this power with power of analysis and organization of raw material
What are the qualities of the flaneur?
The crowd is his element, and it’s always a man. He’s among the crowd, but apart from the crowd. He looks at everything he pleases, but remains annonymous
What is the flaneur searching for?
Modernity. to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.
What does he mean by modernity?
The emphemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.
What must occur for modernity to be one day worthy of antiquity?
It is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it. Every age has its gait, glance, and gesture.
What does he say about artists who study the antique for anything other than pure art, logic, and general method?
If he becomes consumed by it, he will lose all memory of the present, renouncing the rights and privleges offered by circumstance - originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on our sensations.
What is a dandy?
Rich and idle man, whose sole occupation is the pursuit of happiness. Brought up in luxury and used to others’ obedience. His profession is elegance
