ABSTRACT
Knowledge, for Charles Baudelaire, is a matter not of intellectual adequation but of intentionality and participation. The energy of Baudelaire's writing in the Salon comes from a terseness, through which it tends to approximate, as he suggests, within limits of course, to the condition of poetry. Baudelaire's appeal to the ideal 'philosophical' reader draws attention not just to the paradox whereby individualism, properly understood, opens up the widest horizons, but to the equally wide range of its possible applications. Artistic originality is rooted in individual temperament, but the individual is not locked within his own 'aesthetic' like some 'windowless' monad. Whatever the crypto-political implications of the text, the Salon is concerned with art and art-criticism, not politics. It is the growing popularity of landscape painting that prompts Baudelaire's strongest expression of confidence in evolving public taste. The hierarchy of primary and secondary qualities remains operative in what Baudelaire called the analytical 'methode double' or 'methode successive' of academic painting.
