Ideal qualities of the Modern Artist as described by Baudelaire:
Originality – signs work with his dazzling soul –
Ingres (see highlighted sections on page pg 14), despite his technical virtuosity, is not in the same class as Monsieur G. Ingres is a slave to the past. He populates his paintings with trappings of the past. Pillaging history makes his work retrograde, a pastiche of a time gone by. This compromises Ingres’s ability to truly be original, a condition contingent, in Baudelaire’s mind, upon one’s artistic devotion to one’s present.
Discussing originality on page 8 Baudelaire says, “that inspiration has something in common with convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent shock which has its repercussion in the core of the brain.” He may have been on to something. The neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has suggested that there are connections between schizotypal behavior and extreme meta-magical/religious thinking. Could it be that Baudelaire was describing a real scientific phenomenon? According to an article in Scientific American,“Research supports the notion that psychologically healthy biological relatives of people with schizophrenia have unusually creative jobs and hobbies and tend to show higher levels of schizotypal personality traits compared to the general population. Note that schizotypy is notschizophrenia. Schizotypy consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident in some degree in everyone.”
Here is a link to the article quoted above:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-real-link-between-creativity-and-mental-illness/
Autodidact (self-taught) – this is a sign of a curious mind, which is also one of the necessary characteristics of a modern artist
Curiosity/Childlike Wonder – “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will” (pg 8).
Related to curiosity is the idea that the modern artist is present, that he must immerse himself in the city and his surroundings (see highlighted sections on page 11). For Baudelaire, the artist is a kind of mirror; he reveals the city and its inhabitants to themselves. In a sense he is art personified, a living philosophical tool that heightens our connection to the world. The true artist’s work is an antidote to the mundane, a magical elixir that uncovers the splendor of the everyday.
There is also a connection between Baudelaire’s insistence that the artist be present and Buddhist notions of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one's attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, which can be developed through the practice of meditation and other training. This sounds a lot like those sections of text I’ve highlighted on page 11, don’t you think? I would draw a connection between the two.
Power of expression in conjunction with the Power to distill and artistically render what one sees (pg 15)
Monsieur G is a genius because he reorganizes and reinterprets, how we see the world. In so doing he invites us to see the world anew. His work, existing as it does in magazines and newspapers (mass media), are cultural artifacts, which, given their place amongst advertisements and the accouterments of capitalism, open us up to a more sensitive state of mind. They are islands of quite, totems for contemplation adrift in the seas of commerce.
Ability to artistically render the contemporary zeitgeist (spirit of the age)
On page 13 he says, “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” His argument is that the best art and artists are a reflection of their time. Art must be modern, that is, in harmony with the spirit of its time, in step with the historical and cultural moment. This is the essence of what it means to be modern. This conception of modernity and its relationship to art defines the next major artistic project (modernism) in western art. Thus Monsieur G is the prototypical modern artist. He is in tune with his time. He is original. His work distills the age and its character down to its essence. Because he is wise and worldly he dispenses with superficial trends and transitory fashions so that he renders only those elements or characteristics most essential to defining the contemporary milieu. At the bottom of page 13 Baudelaire suggests that for art to be worthy of future study it must have its own character “distilled from it.” This begs an interesting question for contemporary artists working in a post-modern age; how does one distill the characteristics of an age defined by a kind of postmodern fuzziness? Is it even possible for contemporary artists to adhere to Baudelaire’s dictates, when the age they inhabit lacks definable character?