ABSTRACT
Blindness is what Baudelaire criticizes in academic aesthetics: despite wearing a name that would make one believes that it has to do with sensory experience, this discipline seeks rules, systems, patterns and precursors in objects of beauty, and consequently fails to see what is before it. Photography did however bring Baudelaire to reconsider the role of the referent in art, and by doing so, to reconsider canonical aesthetics. He understands that art and reference are not antithetical, that there is an art that involves reference, and that this art does not hope to be beautiful. What will be the criterion in this art is the new. In 1859, Baudelaire is moving towards an aesthetics of reference; not simply does he seek to represent a known world, but he uses reference extensively, as if references to texts accomplished the same function as references to people and places.
