Sublimare il sublime. Kitsch e modernità

Abstract

The essay aims to analyze three stages of modern culture: romanticism, modernism and postmodernism as moments in which sublime loses its power in favor of kitsch. Kitsch emerges as the only aesthetic dimensions that combines the various aspects of modern, making modernism not the culmination of the poetics of modernity, but only a parenthesis. Postmodernism reflects the heritage of romantic sentimentalism and its amplification in the imagery of mass culture. Key shape of these steps is Baudelaire and his last work about Belgium, La Capitale des Singes (The Capital of the Apes). The Baudelaire crude description of Brussels looms as grim anticipation of Las Vegas, definitive symbol of postmodernism.