''By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.''
-from 'The Painter of Modern Life'
-from 'The Painter of Modern Life'
In the French society after 1848, a gap begins to open between bourgeois modernity, on the one hand, and aesthetic modernity, on the other. The later claims of the various modernisms to create the authentically new can be traced back to this early sense of `false' modernity whose surface momentum conceals its inner sameness, its increasing reproduction of the safe limits of the bourgeois world. Here too the particular modernist preoccupation with time begins.
Baudelaire argued that painters should paint figures in contemporary dress, rather than in archaic costumes from the past, and that the contemporary, in all its diverse and fleeting guises, had a heroic or epic dimension. Baudelaire's idea of modernity was not merely a question of being up-to-date or subject to swiftly changing fashions, although these were symptomatic of a modern type of experience. It claimed that the modern in art related to the experience of modernity, that is, to an experience which is always changing, which does not remain static and which is most clearly felt in the metropolitan centre of the city. As soon as we try to pin modernity down or define it in a simple formulation, we risk losing this sense that it is, by definition, constantly subject to renewal, that it marks out shifting ground. For Baudelaire, new subjects required a new technique; just as there were appropriate forms that the modern in art could take, so too there were inappropriate forms.
Baudelaire argued that painters should paint figures in contemporary dress, rather than in archaic costumes from the past, and that the contemporary, in all its diverse and fleeting guises, had a heroic or epic dimension. Baudelaire's idea of modernity was not merely a question of being up-to-date or subject to swiftly changing fashions, although these were symptomatic of a modern type of experience. It claimed that the modern in art related to the experience of modernity, that is, to an experience which is always changing, which does not remain static and which is most clearly felt in the metropolitan centre of the city. As soon as we try to pin modernity down or define it in a simple formulation, we risk losing this sense that it is, by definition, constantly subject to renewal, that it marks out shifting ground. For Baudelaire, new subjects required a new technique; just as there were appropriate forms that the modern in art could take, so too there were inappropriate forms.
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