Ruskin on Art and Life

  • gothic-to-artscrafts1.jpgFin­ish­ing up our quick cruise with a stay in a really great hotel, I picked up a book in the room called “On Art and Life” by John Ruskin. I’m not sure any­one was really sup­posed to read it — it had the look of some­thing that was placed there to lend an artsy atmos­phere — but when I started skim­ming, I found I couldn’t put it down. The author, a renowned Eng­lish art critic of the 19th cen­tury, had much to say about the detri­men­tal effects of the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion that seem rel­e­vant now. As I men­tioned back HERE, there’s a sliver of oppor­tu­nity in the chang­ing nature of man­u­fac­tur­ing in this coun­try. Per­haps we have a chance of revers­ing some of what John Ruskin saw so accu­rately 150 years ago.

    And what Ruskin saw as an art critic was that the focus on mass-production was cre­at­ing flaw­less, cheap, identically-made orna­men­ta­tion that couldn’t com­pare with the charm and clev­er­ness of arti­san work (espe­cially in medieval Chris­t­ian Gothic archi­tec­ture and orna­ment, which Ruskin clearly loved). That may seem like some­thing that would only inter­est another art critic, but there’s a big­ger point behind it:

    Men were not made to work with the accu­racy of tools, to be pre­cise and per­fect in all their actions. If you will have that pre­ci­sion out of them, and make their fin­gers mea­sure degrees like cog wheels, and their arms strike curves like com­passes, you must unhu­man­ize them. All the energy of their spir­its must be given to make cogs and com­passes of them­selves. All their atten­tion and strength must go to the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invis­i­ble nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely pre­ci­sion, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last — a heap of saw­dust, so far as its intel­lec­tual work in this world is concerned.

    Ruskin sees more free­dom in the medieval appren­tice work­ing for his mas­ter than the “free” men who went to work at jobs that took all of a human’s abil­i­ties to try and fail, think and grow, cre­ate and destroy and sub­jected them to the dis­mal repet­i­tive nature of indus­trial labor. In the grow­ing unrest of the work­ing classes at the time of his writ­ing — which would spill over into riots, vio­lent strikes and rev­o­lu­tions in the next 75 years — Ruskin sees a plain­tive inabil­ity for the work­ing­men to artic­u­late where the source of their mis­ery truly lay:

    It is ver­ily this degra­da­tion of the oper­a­tive into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is lead­ing the mass of the nations every­where into vain, inco­her­ent, destruc­tive strug­gling for a free­dom of which they can­not explain the nature to them­selves. The uni­ver­sal out­cry against wealth, and against nobil­ity, is not forced from them either by the pres­sure of famine, or the sting of mor­ti­fied pride. … It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no plea­sure in the work by which they make their bread, and there­fore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure….

    Never had the upper classes so much sym­pa­thy with the lower, or char­ity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the sep­a­ra­tion between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a ver­i­ta­ble dif­fer­ence in level of stand­ing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of human­ity, and there is pesti­len­tial air at the bot­tom of it.

    Ruskin doesn’t deny the tremen­dous boon to be found in mass-producing goods, which pro­vides employ­ment on one hand and afford­able goods on the other, but only asserts that mankind was so blinded by the power of the assem­bly line and the con­veyor belt that we didn’t stop to con­sider what was at stake:

    And the great cry that rises from all our man­u­fac­tur­ing cities, louder than their fur­nace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we man­u­fac­ture every­thing there except men; we blanch cot­ton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pot­tery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a sin­gle liv­ing spirit, never enters into our esti­mate of advantages.

    .
    Ruskin’s “mod­est proposal”

    rosetti-painting.jpgHav­ing laid out the case so com­pletely that a human cri­sis is at hand, Ruskin floun­ders when it comes to offer­ing a solu­tion. Because his Big Idea to all the good Vic­to­rian read­ers of his day is to just stop buy­ing mass-produced goods (in fact, stop buy­ing any­thing they don’t need) and stop valu­ing the flaw­less appear­ance of mechanically-made products.

    I won’t say that Ruskin’s solu­tion didn’t bear fruit. His writ­ings encour­aged the Pre-Raphaelite Broth­er­hood and inspired the Arts and Crafts move­ment. The results of Ruskin’s call to arms are to be seen in the paint­ings of Dante Gabriel Rosetti (at right), the wall­pa­per of William Mor­ris, and the archi­tec­ture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Those are some pretty impres­sive results.

    The prob­lem is that even the zeal and strong sen­si­bil­i­ties of those move­ments has played out now, and the desire for cheap, afford­able — and yes, machine-perfect — goods has gone on and on. It’s too late at this point to tell peo­ple to change their tastes or their buy­ing habits. One seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion has been try­ing to tell another seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion to stop buy­ing at Wal­mart for decades now, but Wal­mart is unstoppable.

    So for my lit­tle part, I don’t call for some cru­sade, or a sea-change on the part of all the buy­ing pub­lic. The times have pro­vided the change — at least for now, at least in this coun­try. I wouldn’t expect mil­lions of peo­ple to develop a more trained eye to look for things that are simply-made or hand-made, and I wouldn’t expect mil­lions to pay the extra price for them. But a few peo­ple is a start. The Web offers many home-made, orig­i­nal, charm­ing good­ies by indi­vid­u­als and small shops. Small local shops and arts & crafts fairs do the same. Reward the arti­san. Pay a lit­tle bit more for an orig­i­nal. Or, if you’ve got the knack, make things your­self and sell them or give them as gifts.

    It’s been impos­si­ble to stop the great wheels of indus­try. Ruskin did as fine a job of try­ing as any­one I’ve read, and the good peo­ple that were moved to action tried with con­sid­er­able tal­ent and courage to do the same. If it turns out that we can suc­ceed in some small mea­sure where they have failed, it is just because the wheels have kept turn­ing until they have passed us by. Much of the unskilled labor force that pow­ered indus­tries for gen­er­a­tions has now been let go. What hap­pens now is unknown, but it’s likely to affect almost every aspect of our culture.

    I wish Ruskin could’ve been here to see it.


    Related posts:

    1. Adver­tis­ing and the state of Art — epi­logue: Art
    2. Silly air­port art
    3. Adver­tis­ing and the state of Art — part I
    4. Adver­tis­ing and the state of Art — epi­logue: pomo
    5. The rugged life

    October 28th, 2007 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • Mimi 10.28.2007

    That’s so cool! What a find.

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