Art and society

Art and society

There was no cataclysmic watershed in Ruskin’s transition from art to social critic; it was

a continuous thematic development where the moral centrality evident in his early works of art criticism began to take on a more immediate social significance. In his writings and lectures in the 1850s Ruskin continued to function in his primary role as an art critic, but as his intolerance of economic inequality and exploitation increased, he became a deliberate and conscious social moralist. His critique of the nineteenth-century POLITICAL ECONOMY remained inextricably inter-related with his role as an aesthete (see AESTHETICS, PAINTING AND ARCHITECTURE) and his conviction that the inherent moral dimension of art and architecture was a reflection of the nation’s values. Following the example of CARLYLE, he did not locate social ills in class inequality, but in the kind of work men were forced to do and in the conditions under which they laboured. In vol. two of The Stones of Venice (1853), he used a romantic (see ROMANTICISM, INDIVIDUALISM AND IDEAS OF THE SELF)/organicist metaphor for his critique of contemporary production methods, translating his admiration for the natural forms of Gothic architecture into a social principle that opposed competition and alienation with co-operation and unity. He criticized the crude nineteenth-century interpretation of Adam Smith’s division of labour, which he claimed was destroying creative freedom, and placed his emphasis on the method of production, the intrinsic value of the end product and its effects on the quality of life. He thought that only by

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moving these ethical considerations from the periphery to the centre of production would

a proper sense of values be restored.

In pursuit of this aspiration Ruskin taught drawing for a time at the Working Men’s College, established in London in 1854, by a group of Christian Socialists under the leadership of F.D.MAURICE. They were not socialists in the later political interpretation of the movement, and proved too moderate to satisfy Ruskin, who was well aware of the growing unrest of the workforce. They did, however, in their emphasis on co-operation, provide a radical alternative to the prevalent orthodox Christian acceptance of social and economic injustice. Even after Ruskin’s evangelical ‘unconversion’ in the late 1850s, he continued to adhere to the fundamental Christian ethics that underpinned his constant push for moral regeneration. Up to 1859 he continued to hope that this regeneration could

be achieved through art, and his conscious moralizing was still contained within the esoteric but recognizable framework of art and architecture.

By 1860, at the age of 41, Ruskin had accepted that society was not going to be saved by art, and that he needed to direct his all-pervading sense of justice at the political economy and a system of values that, he considered, were little more than respect for convention. What he proposed was an alternative set of values, derived from Christian principles, but devoid of evangelical hypocrisy, which were to be the salvation of a sick capitalist society. The lectures he gave in the industrial Mid-lands in the late 1850s—The Political Economy of Art (1857) and The Two Paths (1859)—were a positive statement of Ruskin’s continuity of purpose and conviction. The ethic these lectures located had developed out of the aesthetic realism of The Stones of Venice, and anticipated the more overt critique of classical economics in Unto this Last (1862).