Success Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Beauty, for Baudelaire, isnt a pleasant bonus; its a tyrannical standard that disciplines desire. Calling it the "sole ambition" and "exclusive goal" of Taste turns aesthetics into a moral project with a hard edge: Taste isnt just what you like, its what you submit yourself to. The phrasing is almost bureaucratic in its absolutism, as if art and judgment operate under a single, non-negotiable mandate. Thats the provocation: he strips away the modern comfort that taste can be eclectic, personal, or ethically neutral.

The subtext is a fight against the flattening of experience in an early consumer city. Baudelaire writes in the pressure cooker of mid-19th-century Paris, where mass culture, bourgeois respectability, and industrial modernity are reorganizing attention. "Taste" becomes the battleground. By insisting that Taste has only one goal, he rejects the era's utilitarian logic (art should educate, improve, serve the nation) and its complacent prettiness (art as parlor ornament). Beauty, in his hands, is not softness but intensity: the ability to force perception awake.

It also smuggles in Baudelaire's famous doubleness: beauty is never pure; its mixed with the transient, the artificial, even the corrupt. The line sounds classical, but it sets up his modernist twist: Taste must chase beauty even when beauty lives in the crowded street, in makeup, in vice, in the "flowers" grown from evil.