The historical situation that is being pointed to is one in which artists have ceased to be attached to some nobleman’s entourage and now form a “class” of their own, a group apart, so that their circle of acquaintance consists of other artists. No longer enjoying aristocratic patronage but unable to look to the bourgeois for comprehension… their poems can be dedicated only to each other. But two further points arise in this connection. First, to the extent that the traditional function of the dedication as a means of seeking “political” protection and hence as an acknowledgment of social power survives here in a new guise, the esthetic dedication reveals to us an interaction, in Baudelaire’s social environment, between the world of art and the world of the “majority” with its “strength” – a majority whose taste, as a consequence of its strength, is what determines artistic reputation.
Baudelaire’s Dedicatory Practice
Ross Chambers
SubStance, Vol. 17, No. 2, Issue 56
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
