Abstract
This article considers Baudelaire's essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne as a possible response to the question of why art matters. Baudelaire's exhilarating innovation is to downgrade the significance of eternal value in art, in favour of what he designates its other half, the fleeting presentness that is modernity. Baudelaire explores this idea through a mock-anonymous celebration of the artist Constantin Guys, referred to as M. G., whose prolific sketches, done at speed, for rapid journal publication, chart the day-by-day miniscule changes in the appearances of the city. Guys's pictures — the art of modernity — give to the fleeting moment a second life, and ‘translate’ into a different medium — from sight to (mental) impression to its ‘rebirth’ as a sketch — what would otherwise be lost in its passing.
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