Architecture, Political Economy of Art, and Art Education: Mind and Society

Following the studies of painting, Ruskin started to work in new fields - art of architecture, political economy of art, and art education. As explained above, Ruskin's aesthetics of painting are enough to construct ‘Ruskin's triangle' that integrates his views on art (Beauty) and economy (Wealth).

1.6.1 Art of Architecture

During the ten years after Ruskin published the second volume (1846) of Modern Painters and before he resumed publishing the third and the fourth volumes (1856), he extended his perspective on art from painting to architecture and published The Seven Lamps OfArchitecture (1849) and The Stone of Venice (1851-3). For him, architecture is a synthetic art comprising sculpture and painting. The reason for his shift of interest was that the public as producer and consumer of art is more accessible to architecture than painting and that ugly modern buildings tend to expel the great old styles of architecture in the current materialistic age. The study of architecture made him recognize the moral connection between art and society more firmly than the study of painting; it encouraged the transition from the aesthetics of landscape to the ethics of social relations. Thus architecture became a stepping stone from art to society.

In The Seven Lamps, Ruskin formulates seven normative principles for the art of architecture: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience. The book concerns not only the technicalities of architectural styles, but also the spirit or morality of architecture. Lamp is a metaphor for indicating a right direction. His presumption that art is based on morality is much confirmed in his study of architecture. Among the seven prin­ciples, the lamp of Life unifies all the others; it means that architecture must represent the pulse of Life, not technical regularity or balance.

What characterizes Ruskin's study of architecture is the admiration of Gothic buildings and this is accomplished by the three magnificent vol­umes of The Stones of Venice. The work describes the historical changes of architectural styles (Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance) in Venice on the basis of the theoretical analysis in The Seven Lamps and the vision that architecture is a record of the spiritual activities of ages. It is not merely value-neutral historical research but also sophisticated social criticism of modernity.

Ruskin admires the Medieval Gothic style but, at the same time, he criticizes the subsequent Renaissance style for arrogance, gaudiness, and impiousness, which he regards as representing the degradation and fall of society. He superimposes a decay of morality in Venice upon the danger of culture in a modern society and warns against the modern life relating to art, morality, and society.

In Western Europe after the Romanesque style of the Medieval age (from the tenth to the twelfth centuries), Gothic architecture flourished from the latter half of the twelfth century to the fifteenth century, with Christianity as the internal motivation. Afterwards, the Gothic style was replaced by the Renaissance style in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. From the modern viewpoint, which regards the Renaissance as the awakening of the human mind from medieval oppression, the culture of art represented by the Gothic was deemed as rough, barbaric, and inhuman. As a result, Christian morality, courage, and intellect, and the Gothic art nurtured by them, were doomed to collapse. What Ruskin attacks is the spirit of Renaissance architecture based on the modern point of view. As the fore­runner of the Enlightenment, the rationalists in the Renaissance period attempted the rationalization of art and humanities.

At the end of the third volume of The Stones of Venice Ruskin summar­izes what he calls the ‘theorem’ of all of the volumes:

All the architects who have built in that [Renaissance] style have built what was worthless; and therefore the greater part of the architecture which has been built for the last three hundred years, and which we are now building, is worthless. We must give up this style totally, despise it and forget it, and build henceforward only in that perfect and Christian style hitherto called Gothic, which is everlastingly the best. (vol. 11, 357)

In the famous chapter 6 on ‘The Nature of Gothic’ in the second volume, the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic are presented as follows: Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity, and Redundancy (vol. 10, 184).

The approval for crudeness, imperfection, diversity, and abundance of architectural work and the tolerance for variety of imagination and tenacity of will in the Gothic style are the expression of humility and sincerity of the human soul. Ruskin’s view of architecture as a social phenomenon combines the ‘cooperation’ of all workers on the producer’s side of architecture with the ‘sympathy’ of all people on the consumer’s side. It accords with the view of ‘composition’ and ‘help’ in his idea of painting art. Life is an act of ‘social cooperation’ and all the components of Life must help each other. He finds in Gothic architecture the best style of art for representing ‘cooperation’.

In the concluding chapter of The Stones of Venice, Ruskin expounds ‘the great principle’ as the core of his theory of art:

All art is great, good, and true, only so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood in its entire and highest sense; that is to say, not the work of limbs and fingers, but of the soul, aided, according to her necessities, by the inferior powers; and therefore distinguished in essence from all products of those inferior powers unhelped by the soul.

In his public lecture on ‘The Unity of Art’ (1859b), contained in The Two Paths (1859a), Ruskin defines Fine Art as the cooperative product of ‘hand, head and heart of man’ (vol. 16, 294). Fine Art, unlike technique and manufacture, must represent the ‘whole humanity’; even if certain aspects of faculties are defective for a building’s architecture, it is important that all the components help each other to attain unity within the scheme of ‘composition’. How the ideas of ‘composition’ are designed by imagination determines a nature of art that consists in the expression of ideas. Therefore, a further analysis of ‘composition’ will clarify the framework of Ruskin’s ideas of art and their further implications for economic discussion.

It is worthwhile to notice two aspects of ‘composition’: social and mental. First, for Ruskin, a great work of art must exert and exploit the whole powers of Life rather than obeying the techniques, rules, and cus­toms of art, addressed to the privileged rank of a society. This enables the ‘social cooperation’ between the members of a society, including artists and workers; this is the reason why Ruskin was much concerned with art education for labour. Second, among the different kinds of faculties, in other words ‘intellect’, ‘feeling’, and ‘will’, there is the ‘pre-eminence of the soul’ compared with intellect (vol. 11, 204). ‘Admiration, Hope, and Love’ indicate the noble and moral aspects of the soul.

The ‘social cooperation’ and the ‘pre-eminence of the soul’ are the two principles for locating labour within the ‘composition’ in question. They are also the principles for substantiating both the dynamic Vital Beauty and the static Typical Beauty within the ‘composition’ of an artistic work. When the idea of the ‘composition’ in art is applied as a metaphor of economic society, the design of an economy should be interpreted in terms of these principles.

1.6.2 PoliticalEconomyofArt

The shift of Ruskin’s interest from art to economics was marked by his two public lectures at Manchester, held as part of an art treasures exhibition in 1857.

Although a full-scale presentation of Ruskin's system of economic thought equipped with necessary numbers of concepts must wait for his later works, The Political Economy of Art succeeds to describe the skeleton of an economic model. Since it directly purports to encourage art activity within the capitalist economic system, it presents a unique attempt to locate problems of art within a framework of economic model. It may be called an art-oriented model of normative economics with paternalistic control. Some characteristic views can be mentioned.

First, Ruskin argued that after a century of industrialization, economic goods necessary for survival were already sufficiently secured. It is now possible to allocate resources not only for physical being but also for well­being. This is the postulate of ‘abundance' underlying his economic view (vol. 16, 18).

Second, he distinguished between economic and cultural values of cultural goods (art and science) and proposed a theme of resource alloca­tion for cultural goods. Cultural goods, which are public goods in the modern terminology, contribute to Life in an affluent society through their production, distribution, and accumulation. He suggested that a principle of required resource allocation is not ‘Utility' based on scarcity but ‘Splendour' based on abundance (vol. 16, 20).

Third, he derived a paternalistic social system founded on superior knowledge and wise will from the organic conception of community.

Ruskin combines paternalism with what he calls the truth that ‘the notion of Discipline and Interference lies at the very root of all human progress or power; that the “Let-alone” principle is, in all things which man has to do with, the principle of death' (vol. 16, 26). Apart from moral paternalism as the ground for encouraging art, some of the topics discussed in The Political Economy of Art are considered as a precursor of cultural economics.

1.6.3 ArtEducation

There is a group of articles and speeches by Ruskin that can be termed art education, which took place rapidly after his Manchester speech. It deals with the practical questions of how we should approach art to promote it on a national level, and its central point is the account of the influences of art on people's minds. His efforts in this field, mainly in the form of public lectures, summarize in popular terms the theory of art that he has worked out in larger treatises. It is crucial for him to difluse the knowledge and implications of art and to appeal to the public mind all the more because the success of both art and economy are equally based on morality. I argue that his concerns for art education consist of asking how art relates to three key concepts: ‘morality', ‘nature', and ‘society'.

First, art and morality. In his inaugural address at the Cambridge School of Art (1858b), Ruskin suggests that the great enigma of art history is that the development of art is desirable as well as undesirable; on the one hand, it is found that great art is developed only by people who delight in art; on the other hand, it is also found that the pursuit of art only for delight causes the decline of a nation. He proposes the solution:

The solution of that enigma is simply this fact; that wherever Art has been followed only for the sake of luxury or delight, it has contributed, and largely contributed, to bring about the destruction of the nation practicing it: but wherever Art has been used also to teach any truth, or supposed truth - religious, moral, or natural - there it has elevated the nation practicing it, and itself with the nation. (vol. 16, 197)

The essence of his belief is that only if art expresses the truth of Nature and Mind can it create Beauty for Life. In his public lecture on ‘Education in Art' (1858a), he declares: ‘Perhaps we should find in process of time that Italian connexion of art with diletto, or delight, was both consistent with, and even mainly consequent upon, a pure Greek connexion of art with arete, or virtue' (vol. 16, 145). In other words, art should not be left to the dilettantism of the rich but be combined with virtue. It is his first thesis of art education that the production and consumption of art should be based on morality.

After he moved to the study of economics, Ruskin was elected the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. In his inaugural lecture (1870), he proceeded from the previous stage in which he linked art with morality in abstract terms to a new stage in which he connected art with economy, politics, and social life by formulating the following tenet:

The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues....The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life.... The most perfect mental culture possible to men is founded on their useful energies, and their best arts and brightest happiness are consistent, and consistent only, with their virtue. (vol. 20, 39-40) Ruskin asks the audience to take the thesis that art depends on morality as the most important, because it implies that we find in the laws which regulate art activities the clue to the laws which regulate all industries in economic activities. He maintains that an allegory holds between art and society, which applies the theme of art education to the theme of social reform through the medium of morality.

Second, art and Nature. The second theme of art education concerns the observation and interpretation of Nature as the essential link between art and morality. In his public lecture on ‘The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations’ (1858c), Ruskin argues on the relationship between art and Nature:

You will find enough to justify you in concluding that art, followed as such, and for its own sake, irrespective of the interpretation of nature by it, is destructive of whatever is best and noblest in humanity; but that nature, however simply ob­served, or imperfectly known, is, in the degree of affection felt for it, protective and helpful to all that is noblest in humanity. You might then conclude further, that art, so far as it was devoted to the record or interpretation of nature, would be helpful and ennobling also. (vol. 16, 268)

This thesis relates to the effects of art through the observation of Nature (‘Pure Air, Water, and Earth’) on morality. Through the involvement of art with the truth of Nature, man becomes conscious of his own existence in the natural universe and develops his character of humility and devotion. It is because God stamped His figures of Beauty on the universe of Nature and made love for them the nature of human Mind. Through the artistic expression and interpretation of Nature as the determinant of Life, artistic energy and its development bring about national energy and its develop­ment. Love of Nature is the supreme condition of art, which Ruskin shares with Wordsworth and Turner.

Third, art and society. Ruskin focuses on social relations as the inter­vention between art and morality in addition to Nature. For him, social relations play the role of representing ‘social cooperation’ as the embodi­ment of the ‘composition’ of art. This constitutes the third theme of art education. He argues for the place of art in society in his public lecture on ‘Modern Manufacture and Design’ (1859c):

The great lesson of history is, that all the fine arts hitherto - having been supported by the selfish power of the noblesse, and never having extended their range to the comfort or the relief of the mass of the people - the arts, I say, thus practiced, and thus matured, have only accelerated the ruin of the States they adorned.... For us there can be no more the throne of marble - for us no more the vault of gold - but for us there is the loftier and lovelier privilege of bringing the power and charm of art within the reach of the humble and the poor; and as the magnificence of past ages failed by its narrowness and its pride, ours may prevail and continue, by its universality and its lowliness. (vol. 16, 341-2)

By changing the direction of artistic activity, Ruskin argues, we can view the peaceful and vigorous society which leans neither to the oppression of labour nor to the extravagance of vanity. Changes in the direction of both art and society are derived from the principle of ‘social cooperation' which is the allegory of the ‘composition' in art.

Thus, the three themes of art education, which consist of ‘morality, nature, and society', maintain that ‘labour', as the social agent of Life, must interact with Mind and Nature to contribute the best to Life. They in all give us a kind of summary of ideas on the ‘compositions' of the six determinants of Life in Figure 1.1 and ‘Ruskin's triangle' in Figure 1.2.

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