Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Baudelaire

Modernity, for Baudelaire, isn’t a triumphal march of progress; it’s a nervous condition. When he defines it as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent,” he’s elevating what polite culture tries to dismiss: fashion, crowds, noise, fleeting faces on the boulevard. This is Paris in mid-19th-century acceleration - Haussmann’s renovations, new consumer spectacles, new forms of anonymity. The city is being rebuilt, and so is perception itself. Baudelaire’s provocation is to treat that churn not as contamination of “true” art, but as one of its required ingredients.

The line works because it refuses a clean split between high permanence and low ephemera. Art has two halves: one that chases the present tense and one that anchors it. The subtext is a warning to artists who cling to timeless ideals as if they were neutral. “Eternal and immutable” sounds noble, but Baudelaire implies it can become a form of evasion - a way to hide from the actual social texture of a moment, including its ugliness. Modern life is contingent because it’s shaped by markets, politics, and chance encounters; pretending otherwise turns art into a museum piece while the street keeps moving.

He’s also smuggling in a theory of taste: what looks disposable today can be tomorrow’s necessary evidence. The modern isn’t the enemy of beauty; it’s the raw material through which beauty has to pass if it wants to matter to living people.