Quotes
“The Painter of Modern Life” (
The dandy, in short, is blasé—“for reasons of policy and caste.” The comment about caste becomes clear when Baudelaire explains that the dandy necessarily possesses an “aristocratic superiority of mind.” By this point in the essay, it is clear that Baudelaire is really talking about himself as the painter—or the poet—of modern life, and that modern life is really a form of decadence, because “dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall.
Vienna is another nineteenth-century capital of modernity that makes up part of the urban geography of decadence, and so is Berlin. But the political and social conditions most conducive to the culture of decadence do not coalesce in the case of Berlin until the twentieth century, during the period of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933)
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