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New Media. AI image Introduction When a new technology enters the artistic field, it rarely does so quietly. More often, it unsettles hierarchies, redistributes authority, and provokes fierce resistance from those whose status was secured under older conditions. The current controversies surrounding large language models and generative images belong to this long historical pattern. A dramatic precedent can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 text Le public moderne et la photographie , where the poet launches a vitriolic attack against the newly emerging medium of photography. Reading this essay today, one is struck not only by the violence of Baudelaire’s language, but also by the familiarity of its argumentative structure. This article argues that contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence reproduce the same moral and aesthetic logic that informed Baudelaire’s denunciation of photography. Despite the apparent inversion of their complaints (mechanical realism in the nin...

No verbal traps . Stencil graffiti. AI image Introduction: An Anachronistic Accusation Charles Baudelaire never read Derrida, Lacan, or Barthes. Yet it is difficult to imagine that he would have liked them. More provocatively, had he encountered French poststructuralism, he would likely have recognized in it the very cultural pathology he diagnosed in Le public moderne et la photographie (Salon de 1859). Beneath the gravity of theory and the prestige of philosophy, Baudelaire would have discerned a familiar vice: l’esprit français at its most triumphant—verbal ingenuity elevated into spectacle, linguistic cleverness mistaken for depth, and an audience eager to be astonished rather than transformed. This essay advances a deliberately anachronistic and polemical hypothesis. Reading French poststructuralism through Baudelaire’s critique of modern art, it argues that Baudelaire would have accused twentieth-century theorists and their readers of participating in the same econom...