Further Thoughts on Ruskin. . .

In my last blogpost I briefly addressed the issues surrounding the British Art/Social critic John Ruskin. A very old friend of mine, for whom I have a great deal of respect, was kind enough to repost that post on Facebook. A mutual friend of ours from our college days then made a lengthy comment on it, in which he felt that he needed to come to the defence of poor Ruskin. Why exactly he felt compelled to defend the old man of Brantwood escaped me entirely. Nothing I said about Ruskin was particularly controversial. I wasn’t by any means harsh on him, nor did I offer any opinions that have not been made before by people eminently more qualified than myself. Thus, I was surprised when this old acquaintance posted a defensive panegyric of Ruskin coupled with an ad homonym critique of me, calling me, and my opinion of Ruskin, “capricious.” My own capriciousness aside (and perhaps it is a fair claim), it is not entirely clear that an opinion, in and of itself, can be properly characterized by this adjective. In order to determine the capriciousness of my opinion of Ruskin, one would be required, at the very least, to have a point of comparison, which, not having talked to me about this or anything else in nearly 30 years, he decidedly did not.

However, these comments, though only superficially informed, got me thinking more closely about the problems we face when thinking about a 19^th century critic like Ruskin. I wrote there that I thought that Ruskin’s ideas lacked “rigour.” And though I was not clear about what this meant, I stand by that opinion. I refer to Ruskin as lacking rigour not because he is not thorough, but rather because he depends on vague, meta-concepts about which there is no common agreement. In Ruskin’s mind, for example, great landscape painting is that which properly expresses the sublimity of God’s creation, and great art is that which reflects a certain ethical construct. One needn’t be a philosopher to understand that such concepts are overwhelmingly ambiguous. For such ideas to form part of a rigorous argument they would have to be subject to general agreement in some form. I understand, I think, what Ruskin is trying to get at some level, but the problem here is not really understanding. Ruskin was not simply trying to state his opinion, per se, he was attempting to establish a qualitative notion of art. But establishing such a theory would require agreement about the function of art as well as the subsequent criteria for quality. And agreement on such issues simply don’t prevail, let alone consensus about the nature of God or properly ‘ethical’ behaviour.

This problem is by no means exclusive to Ruskin. In fact, it is characteristic of most aesthetic philosophers. It is for this reason that qualitative theories about art largely disappeared in the 20^th century. (Indecently, these points apply even more pointedly to literary theory) Meta-theories of art have been largely replaced by straight up commentary, or, at most, inter-subjective critiques of art. By inter-subjective, I mean criticizing a work of art within certain, already basically agreed upon standards. (In this sense I could, for example, critique a film by placing it squarely within a genre and then comparing it to what advocates of that genre believe are effect expressions of that particular genus of film.

I must admit that despite my somewhat ‘post-modern’ and relativistic outlook, I like Ruskin. I think my appreciation comes from the fact that I sympathize with his project of finding a qualitative theory of art. Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court once said (to paraphrase) that he couldn’t successfully define obscenity but he knew it when he saw it. I often feel the same about good art. Like a true Romantic, I want to believe that ‘great’ art is out there. It is a strange, inexplicable combination of technical skill, originality, and profound thought. The problem is that, if I am intellectually honest with myself, I am pretty sure none of these ideas can be properly defined, so like Justice Stewart, I am stuck with a platitude. And in the end, much of Ruskin’s great text Modern Painters, is just a wonderful, seductively eloquent platitude.