David Weir

“The Painter of Modern Life” (

The dandy, in short, is blasé—“for reasons of policy and caste.” The comment about caste becomes clear when Baudelaire explains that the dandy necessarily possesses an “aristocratic superiority of mind.” By this point in the essay, it is clear that Baudelaire is really talking about himself as the painter—or the poet—of modern life, and that modern life is really a form of decadence, because “dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall.

Vienna is another nineteenth-century capital of modernity that makes up part of the urban geography of decadence, and so is Berlin. But the political and social conditions most conducive to the culture of decadence do not coalesce in the case of Berlin until the twentieth century, during the period of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933)

Think of decadence as an ornate, highly artificial object that resembles nothing in nature, represented on a slide projected through an old-fashioned magic lantern, seen through a series of colored filters, each color representing a different aspect of decadence

Paul Verlaine’s sonnet “Langueur.

The ancient Greeks, also, accepted homosexuality as something elevated and noble, while Wilde’s Victorian contemporaries regarded it as something decadent, sinful, and criminal

Petronius achieved celebrity because of his indolence, “and yet he was not considered a glutton and a spendthrift, like most of those who squander their fortunes, but a man of educated extravagance.

but there is no doubt that the ancient novel has had an impact on modern conceptions of decadence.

what the life of a decadent Roman might have been like in the age of Nero

t Ausonius (310–395 ce) is a good example of such a writer.