In The Painter of Modern Life Baudelaire asserted that ‘sublime thought’ is associated with a neural phenomenon – a ‘nervous impulse’. The notion of such an impulse (a reverberation in the cerebral cortex) displaces the basis of aesthetic response from the metaphysical to the biological – a very ‘decadent’ idea. Why?
Because the
specific form of Aestheticism derived from this proposition treated ‘Beauty’
solely as a stimulus of the nerves – thus art need only address the nervous
system. It can, in pursuit of psycho-physical stimulation, safely ignore deadly
serious didactics, social polemics and the idle chatter of metaphysics.
Illus: Anxiety of Glamour, 2002 (detail)
