ABSTRACT
In 1846, intuiting that modernisation would entail transformations in the
function of the aesthetic, Baudelaire defined art as a technique of memorising
artistic tradition in the face of loss. The artists who best triggered this
‘mnemotechny of beauty’,1 or at least the subliminal artistic afterimages that
Baudelaire wanted, were those who found some middle point between an
excessive realism and an over-generalised idealism: artists like Delacroix
whose strange and melancholy canvases, based on historical and literary
themes, ‘created deep avenues for the most adventurous imagination to
wander down’.2 As it transpired, or so Benjamin Buchloh has argued, many
modernist practices came to embody Baudelaire’s fears and to enshrine ‘the
triumphant annihilation of cultural memory’; when not reflective of industrial
technology or mimicking the forms of its commodities, art became assimilated
to its associated myths of progress.3 Recently a mnemonic aspect seems to
have returned to many artistic practices, particularly through an interest in
the way traumatic experience restructures both history and subjectivity.4
