The Salon By Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire The father of modern art criticism, Charles Baudelaire had mixed feeling about how art progressed in the modern era. Although he said that he admired modern art, he wrote several books criticizing photography, a modern art prevalent during his time. In his work The Salon, he expressed his discontent for photography and criticized that it is science interfering with the beauty of art. From Baudelaire’s first sentence in this excerpt, it is blatantly obvious that he is displeased with the concept of photography as it “…contributed not a little to confirm stupidity in its faith and to ruin whatever might remain of the divine in the French mind.” Like many other artists and art critics at the time, he believed
Baudelaire also believed that the creation of the daguerreotype made people more lethargic because in The Salon, he explicitly states, “As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore...the mark of a blindness, an imbecility...”. As the art of using the Daguerreotypes became more popular, the once prevalent art of painting began to decrease in popularity, and Baudelaire legitimately thought that painting would perish and be replaced with the “repugnant” and “pathetic” industry of photography. Besides that, he also believed that art and science were very different and should not be mixed. If this happened, according to Baudelaire, art would completely corrupt art altogether, and because photography, a mix of art and science, had been conjured, he ushered it to be part of science and to not interfere with the arts and the imagination. Baudelaire acknowledged that photography would be a magnificent thing to have at certain times, but says, “if [photography] be allowed to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value