John Ruskin, the English art critic spent the years 1843-1860 writing about art and architecture and producing Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice to try and determine what beauty is through the lens of art, religious belief and Gothic architecture.
He came to the conclusion that ‘good art is the expression of a just and healthy society’. If society is unjust, ugly and diseased, there is not much point in criticising the art. Nineteenth-century society, in his view, was founded on a system of greed, competition and oppression of the poor. Inevitably these injustices infected its cultural artefacts. He saw no such impediment in Gothic architecture as found all over France and Venice even though even a cursory examination of social history would have undermined the proposition of healthy or just. He also championed the English painter Turner, convinced that the man had a direct route to God through his painting. In his opinion the critic’s role was to criticise the society that produced the art because art held up a mirror to society. He was happy to ignore all of the injustices of the society that produced Gothic architecture, convinced that the beauty and grandeur reflected the best in humankind.
Ruskin’s views have largely fallen by the wayside. Can it still be said that good art reflects a good society when the conditions of greed, competition and oppression are probably more exacerbated now than they were in his time? He also believed that great art was the product of artists living a virtuous life – until he found how dissolute Turner for one, actually was. Religious belief notwithstanding, I wonder what he would have said about the art of today or indeed the last century. Does it all reflect the society which produced it or indeed, a healthy society? Can we still talk about art in the same way that Ruskin could, let alone identify canons of beauty? Probably not.
There is no doubt that the art of the last century or so has reflected massive social change and that both the technology used to create art and the subject matter would be unrecognisable to Ruskin. He had little time for the near abstraction of Whistler in the 19th century and would no doubt have despaired at what was to follow. He was writing in an age before self-indulgent art became the norm, before art based upon personal memory, self and ego supplanted the idea of external stimulus. Proust, also writing in the 19th century, promoted Ruskin’s ideas initially. He said that ‘there is no work of art without a subject that imposes itself upon the poet from the outside’ and ‘it is by subjugating one’s mind so as to convey this vision that we draw close to this truth, that the artist becomes truly himself’. Both writers considered that the impetus for art came from external sources but Proust lived to see the beginnings of Modern Art and mixed with the art elite of the day from Monet, the Fauves, Picasso, Gide, Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nijinsky. By 1920 he was writing about a society in moral decay and seeing great artists as coming from an alternate world. Ruskin would have agreed.
So, what of today? Artists create work based on all sorts of ideas. Some use art as protest [climate change is popular but unlikely to be affected by art] while other drool over the colours of a sunset. A healthy society? In some ways, yes. The landscape tradition exemplifies eternal optimism and even the protest art faction believe that they can have a positive effect. At based upon moral decay, greed and corruption has a shock value to an extent but Netflix and Stan have seen to it that we as a generation are thoroughly inoculated against seeing parallels in the real world. Fantasy is a far safer proposition than reality anyway given how boring many consider their lives to be.
As for artists living a virtuous life. Who knows. In order to create art there is a necessity to actually go out of the studio and live whether that is clubbing, travelling or lying on the beach. Virtue has nothing to do with the lived experience and given the greatly diminished attendance at churches, perhaps there is no one left to remind the artistic community of just what virtue is when not getting caught is the by-word when it comes to disobeying traffic laws.