Two Pioneers in the Critical Process of Modernism: Baudelaire and Benjamin

Abstract

Modernity is characterized by a sense of physical, social and spiritual fragmentation, by a loss of wholeness, a shattering of human connection, and disintegration of permament value. Baudelaire who was an influential art critic aimed to bring modernity into poetry and painting. Baudelaire claimed that the modern in art related to the experience of modernity, that is; to an experience which is always changing, which does not remain static and which is most clearly felt in the centre of the city. For Baudelaire this was not only subject to swiftly changing fashions, although these were symptomatic of a modern type of experience but also constantly subject to renewal. The German critic Walter Benjamin writes of Baudelaire's own sensitivity to the traumatic shocks of the modern city. In 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility', Walter Benjamin considers the effects of new conditions of production on the structure of works of art. In this sence Walter Benjamin transformed Benjamins engagement with the urban space of modernism into a critique of the ideological formation of modern life. Today, Benjamin's charge to read culture as ideology is interjected into the history of art as part of its critical methodology.