Page 100 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 100/206
Charles Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays 1863.
including: title essay; Eugene Delacroix; Edgar Allan Poe; Wagner and Tannhauser; Philosophy of Toys (etc). This remarkable collection of essays begins to define Baudelaire’s ideal of the modern artist as “the spiritual citizen of the universe” - and as a flaneur. On this ideal state - of the stylish, detached but informed observer of the emerging metropolitan society - the art historian Anne Talley comments: “A constant spectator’, the modern artist should always be ‘keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial.’Baudelaire equates the curiosity of the modern artist to that of a child. He claims artistic genius to be ‘nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” and that the artist must see everything ‘in a state of newness.’ With their mind open to the world, the modern artist can then choose from a variety of relatable, modern subjects.” (annatalleydesign.com/). The prescience of Baudelaire’s 1863 insights is remarkable - the next half-century or so show the impact of modern technologies - the train, the omnibus, photography, film, on our (stream of) consciousness, on Cubism, Impressionism, the ‘snap-shot’. Baudelaire’s insights mapped the beginning of Modernism.
The impact of Baudelaire’s insight - expanded later by the German sociologist Georg Simmel (in The Metropolis and Mental Life 1903) - on art practice (Impressionism, expressionism, cubism, symbolism etc), on photography and the impact of the ’snap-shot’ (Herschel)- on painting (Degas), and new writing (Zola, Dickens, Mann and Joyce) - on the emerging cinematic arts from sequential motion capture (Muybridge) to cinematography itself (Le Prince and Lumiere) - the flaneur as voyeur (Baudelaire, Benjamin, Debord)- stream of consciousness (James), Cubism (Braque, Picasso), photomontage (Heartfield etc), - all these forms contrasting the speed and mobility of modern life, the fragmentary perceptions of the city-dweller and the inner life of the perceptive artist.