Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseauism in all its forms. Today, Rousseauism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse.
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Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 429Charles Baudelaire
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Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseausism in all its forms. Today, Rousseausism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse.
Camille Paglia
Baudelaire is the great symbol of l’art pour l’art (art for the sake of art): sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose.
Charles Baudelaire
The time has probably come to admit that the notion of an avant-garde is no longer useful in discussing contemporary literature. How can there be an avant-garde without a mainstream? Avant-garde de quoi? one must ask. Establishment institutions — universities, museums, foundations, commercial galleries, even the state — have embraced the idea of experimental art for so long that the avant-garde is now a safely domesticated concept, just another traditional style.
Dana Gioia
I think a label like "avant-garde" defeats itself. You learn to have avant-garde exhibitions. The very fact that avant-garde can have an exhibition defeats the purpose of avant-garde, because it's already formalised and ritualised.
John Lennon
For the notion of progress in the arts, (either spiritually or artistically) has been discredited by many respectable intellects (Kierkegaard and Baudelaire above all, both of whom encountered the idea when it first reared itself in its present form in Europe).
Patrick Swift
Baudelaire, Charles
Baudrillard, Jean
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