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.

John Ruskin and the Problem of Taste. . .

I recently hit upon the idea of reading through the entire text of John Ruskin's Modern Painters. I know, it sounds crazy in the age of text messaging and audio books to actually read a five volume, 19th century text about art written in a convoluted, 18th century style. But I live on the edge, I am a daredevil. I once read an version of this book that had been edited to the bare bones of what the editor believed to be the most important excerpts - a sort of Ruskin's greatest hits. However, I decided that the time had come to take the aesthetic plunge, so to speak, and read the entire five volumes, in order to see if Ruskin's massive reputation has been well deserved.

Ruskin is often, if not usually, considered to be the most important anglo art critic of the 19th century. He is, perhaps, most renowned for his spirited defence of Turner at a time when that artist was being widely vilified. Or, perhaps, he is most famous for his rather spirited attack on the work of James Whistler and the libel case that ensured.

Ruskin suffered a number of personality drawbacks, for want of a better phrase, which has left his reputation in something of a dodgy state with many. It has often been said that he was unable to consummate his marriage with Effie Gray because his delicate sensibilities were offended at the sight of a woman in the flesh.  It seems that Ruskin's only experience with a naked woman was with marble statues, which are considerably smoother and more "ideal" than the body of a "real" woman. (Most importantly for Ruskin was, perhaps, his surprise in discovering that women, unlike marble sculptures, had body hair). Luckily for Effie, she eventually married the painter John Everett Millais, bore him eight children and seems to have had a relatively happy life. Another problem which Ruskin displayed was a typically aristocratic pompousness and overwrought sense of self-importance. Once Ruskin was convinced of the correctness of one of his philosophical postulations, he was  unable to brook disagreement.

Unfortunately for Ruskin he suffered from mental illness as he aged, (what some now believe to have been Cadasil Syndrome), and he gradually degenerated into a state of mental incapacity.

Despite his drawbacks and weaknesses, Ruskin was a profoundly interesting man. He was not only an important art critic, but he was a champion of the Arts and Crafts movement, and wrote fairly extensively about politics and society. His interesting, if somewhat naive, book Unto This Last, was an important document concerning his belief in the importance of social cooperation and the evils of industrial capitalism. Furthermore, it was a book that had a profound influence on the life of Mahatma Gandhi, who read it when he lived in South Africa and patterned much of his future political/social efforts on it.

Modern Painters was written by Ruskin in the 1840s and is considered by many to be one of the more important texts on art ever written. And though I have not gone all the way through it yet, I would say, on first blush, that it is a fairly difficult text for a 21st century reader to appreciate. It makes explicit appeals to religion which probably seem antiquated for many today and it lacks intellectual rigour. Like so many books on art, it makes huge assumption that lack argument and in the end it seems to come off, at least in part, as a very elaborate justification of a man's personal aesthetic taste. The crux of Ruskin's whole intellectual problems can be highlighted in a number of places in the first part of the first volume. I was particularly struck by the following passage made in Ruskin's preliminary discussion of the basis of art.

"Ideas of beauty, then, be it remembered, are the subjects of moral, but not intellectual, perception. By the investigation of them we shall be led to the knowledge of the ideal subjects of art."

Herein, as they say, lies the rub. One could easily argue that both of the above statements cannot be true, they are mutually exclusive.  If, as Ruskin says, ideas of beauty are really subjects of moral perception, then we would be unable to properly investigate them (or at least decide upon any 'objective' truth about them) through a process of intellectual investigation. In other words, if notions of beauty are really moral, or ethical matters, they will continually resist intellectual investigations. Put more explicitly, they will never be decided in any objective sense through rational discourse.

To put this more clearly, since no universal agreement can be found concerning ethical or normatively 'correct' behaviour, an art theory which considers art or beauty in an ethical light, will wield little to intellectual investigations. In other words, what Ruskin has done is to champion a non-rigorous, irrational field of human endeavour, to wit - morals, and then suggested that through intellectual investigations we will be able to decide upon this non-intellectual notion.

Now, some people might react to this discourse and say "Hold on here. Moral or ethical questions are not immune to intellectual investigation." And of course they are not. We might engage in a rational investigation of what someone's moral standards are. And we might, in a pinch, come to decide upon how they came about those standards. However, in the end, the correctness or incorrectness of someone's morals is not really subject of objective, intellectual discovery. Similarly, if we imagine, at some level, that a 19th century art critic like Ruskin is ultimately concerned with deciding upon the "value" or "quality" of a work of art and taste in general, then he runs into a major problem when he a priori decides that questions of beauty are really only questions of morals.

This problem goes to the very heart of much art theory and criticism. Many people talk about art in a purely exploratory manner. We can explore things like how the art affects us, what kinds of traditions the art exists in, what artists have been an influence in its production, social reception of art, etc., etc. However, obvious, and very profound problems arise when we try to make decisions about the quality of art. (Anyone who has read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance knows this well.) Can we decide upon the quality of art beyond the relatively simple questions of skill or power of execution?? I have been investigating and thinking about this problem for over thirty years and I am no closer to a solution today than I was at the beginning.

A critic like Ruskin is convinced that he knows what constitutes "good" taste and "good" art. To justify his opinions he brings in all sorts of spiritual, religious, and moral ideas that not only seem somewhat antiquated to readers today, but are also entirely subjective matters. This is not to say that Modern Painters is a waste of paper. There is a great deal of interesting historical and semi-technical information to be found in its pages. And besides those important incentives to read Modern Painters, it must not be forgotten that Ruskin is a VERY good writer with eloquent (albeit somewhat old-fashioned) prose. If you like fine 19th century English prose, you will find few writers to rival Ruskin.