What is art? Prostitution.

Taken at face value, the aphorism equates art with “prostitution” in the sense of self-exposure and sale: the artist offers intimate vision, feeling, or imagination to strangers, translating inner life into a commodity that circulates in public. The line also implies a moral ambivalence—art’s power depends on seduction, display, and the courting of an audience’s desire, which can feel like a compromise of purity or privacy. In a Baudelairean frame, the comparison is not merely condemnatory: it underscores modernity’s entanglement of beauty with commerce, and the way aesthetic experience is mediated by the marketplace and by the artist’s need to be seen.