By the nineteenth century, the badaud — which translates to ‘bystander,’ ‘gawker’ or ‘gawper’ — was recognised as a ubiquitous modern social type.[1] According to the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (1867) ‘the badaud is curious; he is astonished by everything he sees; he believes everything he hears, and he shows his contentment or his surprise by his open, gaping mouth.’[2]Easily entertained, but always seeking novelty, the badaud makes an ideal consumer, imbibing a pervasive strain of conventionality and anti-intellectualism. The badaud is often understood in contrast with the better known flâneur. But while the flâneur maintained their independence and observed detachedly, the badaud is inextricably linked to the crowd, both in physical and mental proximity.
Consider the rise of infotainment, parasocial media, deskilling and outsourcing, and the advanced erosion of the barriers separating the personal from the political and the public from the private. Despite the cyber utopic promises of the early internet, today’s networked culture has congealed into a heavily surveilled and ideologically fraught territory rife with propagandism and fundamentally allergic to nuance. Though the badaud has never had the reach of its iconic counterpart, the flaneur, the term might perfectly suit the contemporary subject and provide a crucial clue to understanding the current models of interpreting, consuming and creating art.
un Magazine issue 18.1 Badaud features essays, reviews, short fiction and artwork that confront the manifold manifestations of badauderie today. Typically cloaking a writer’s complicity with the status quo and happy compliance with market trends, the art-word refrains of ‘openness’ and ‘ambiguity’ (sometimes elaborated as asking questions, not providing answers) are often defensively wielded to avoid expressing a coherent worldview or forgo defining a serious set of aesthetic or political commitments. Rather than cede to ineffectual platitudes, the contributors to this issue have a point to argue. Along with the suggestion that trivial pursuits, passive consumption and faux experience might be bad for us (and art), this issue reinforces the importance of critical writing as a bulwark against dubious appropriations and the obfuscating veil of good intentions.
Though we may all be ‘part-time’ badauds, perhaps we should be wary of untempered badauderie.
[1].Miranda Gill, Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 138–40.
[2] Pierre Athanase Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1867, p. 39.
