Charles Baudelaire, green-haired dandy and father of the avant-garde spirit, experienced first hand the emergence of the reign of the commodity. As the keen and sensitive thinker he was he understood early on that if the work of art was to survive in the irresistibly seductive world of modern merchandise, it would be because it was able to compete on par with it. Broadly speaking, Agamben tells us, the situation was as follows:

Once the commodity had freed objects of use from the slavery of being useful, the borderline that separated them from works of art —the borderline that artists from the Renaissance forward had indefatigably worked to establish by basing the supremacy of artistic creation on the “making” of the artisan and the laborer—became extremely tenuous.¹

The work of art as creative endeavor, Baudelaire noticed, was in danger of extinction. The attack came from two fronts. It was not only that the merchandise threatened to completely change the character of everyday objects, in addition to this, the reproduction techniques ruined the idea of originality implied in artistic doing, a theme that Walter Benjamin would later deal with extensively. Baudelaire’s solution was as bold as it was risky: if the commodity was to invade daily life, art should not be far behind. For this, the work of art would had to become a commodity of sorts, but one that was not subject to “the tyranny of the economic and the ideology of progress.”² Thus, art would have to integrate itself into daily life, as the competition had already done, but it had to do so by its own rules. The work of art, Agamben tells us, was to become an absolute commodity, a new type of object “in which the process of fetishization would be pushed to the point of annihilating the reality of the commodity as such.

A commodity in which use-value and exchange value reciprocally cancel out each other, whose value therefore consists in its uselessness and whose use in its intangibility, in no longer a commodity: the absolute commodification of the work of art is also the most radical abolition of the commodity.³

Unbeknownst to Baudelaire, his plan for an absolute commodity had already been carried out to an extent by dandyism and, in particular, by Beau Brummell. However, in the case of the dandy, the cancellation of use value and the exacerbation of the intangibility of exchange value necessarily leads to the transformation of the person (mask) into a commodity and not into its disappearance as such. Since it is planted in a threshold, the dandy is looking simultaneously in two directions: whoever elevates himself as an object will simultaneously degrade itself as a commodity. The anabasis of the object is the katabasis of the commodity (0.5, 0.7, 0.8). Brummell embodies the mechanism through which the human disappears as such and becomes a market-ready product (0.19).

Fame had a shelf-life from the very beginning.

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1. Agamben, Stanzas, 42. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎