Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Modernity, for Baudelaire, isn`t a shiny future; it`s the jittery present that won`t sit still. By defining it as "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent", he frames modern life as a weather system: always shifting, always conditional, impossible to capture with the old heroic poses of academic art. The provocation is structural. He splits art in two halves and insists both are necessary. Miss the transient and you get museum-grade embalming; miss the eternal and you get fashionable noise that expires on contact.

The intent is polemical, aimed at mid-19th-century Paris where crowds, commodities, gaslight, and new rhythms of the street were remaking perception. Baudelaire was watching painting and literature struggle to keep up with a city that had turned experience into a sequence of sensations. His demand is that artists stop pretending timelessness can be reached by ignoring the moment. Timelessness, he implies, is produced through attention to what everyone else treats as disposable.

The subtext is anxious and strategic. Calling modernity "one half" admits how seductively shallow the new can be: novelty for novelty`s sake, the market`s constant churn. But pairing it with "the eternal and the immovable" is not a retreat into tradition; it`s a challenge to extract enduring meaning from the throwaway. Baudelaire is basically inventing the job description of the modern artist: part reporter, part metaphysician, finding the permanent pulse inside the day`s passing costume.