Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

ART AND MONEY
worthy inheritors of the aristocratic culture of the past. Here, involvement with
the autonomous artwork represents detachment from the claims of practical life,
even while its ownership and enjoyment require both money and the time made
possible by money and so signify financial success along with cultural superiority.
It is indeed the new uses made of images, music, writing, and the rest—notably
for the construction of a mode of sensibility characterized by distance from
material necessity and so free to cultivate responsiveness to experience—that
appear as the autonomy of art. Essential to this concept is not just the liberation
of the arts from their former social functions but their conceptual separation
from the everyday life under the sway of economic interest that the bourgeoisie
in reality shares with its social inferiors, apart from those moments devoted to
the detachment essential to the aesthetic attitude. In fact, the acquisition of the
aesthetic attitude derives from and marks a position of privilege in the very
realm of economics from which that attitude officially declares its independence.
And although the conception of art as transcendent of social reality provides a
naturalist disguise for the actual historical process within which it came into existence
and for the socio-economic prerequisites—leisure and education—of its
enjoyment, the truth, as we have seen, will out. If Baudelaire was moved by the
Salon of 1859 to compare poetry and progress to “two ambitious men who hate
one another with an instinctive hatred,” it was the same poet who had addressed
his criticism of the Salon of 1846 “To the Bourgeois”: “for as not one of you
today can do without power, so not one of you has the right to do without
poetry.” 76
76 Charles Baudelaire, Arts in Paris, 1841–1862, tr. Jonathan Mayne (Oxford: Phaidon, 1965),
pp. 154, 41.
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