Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} On Art and Life by John Ruskin History of the Victorian Art Critic and Writer John Ruskin. Ruskin200.com is no longer available here. Please visit ruskinprize.co.uk/manchester instead. Who Was John Ruskin? John Ruskin was undoubtedly a fascinating character, one of the most famous art critics of the Victorian era. His many talents included philosophy, philanthropy, and writing. His books spanned many genres, including geology, myths, and literature. Ruskin's Personal Life. Ruskin had a complex personality and today would be described as bipolar, as he often suffered bouts of depression. For long periods, the state of his mental health rendered him powerless to do anything. His first relationship was a failure. He was said to be disgusted by his wife's body, leading to a divorce on the grounds of consummation not having happened. A second love affair was marred by tragedy as the object of his affections died of anorexia at the age of 27. Ruskin's Books. A prolific writer, Ruskin, published several important works on a great many subjects. His first volume of Modern Painters was a very influential piece, written when he was only 24. His alternative views on popular artists brought him to the attention of the art establishment. The Stones of Venice was published in 1851 and discussed Ruskin's love of Venice and its architecture. His beliefs that the classical style represented a need to control civilisation are still studied today. There is much to learn about John Ruskin, and there is a museum dedicated to him, located in the Lake District. It houses many of his watercolours, sketchbooks, and artefacts from his collection. John Ruskin. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. John Ruskin , (born February 8, 1819, London, England—died January 20, 1900, Coniston, Lancashire), English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose who seeks to cause widespread cultural and social change. Early life and influences. Ruskin was born into the commercial classes of the prosperous and powerful Britain of the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars. His father, John James Ruskin, was a Scots wine merchant who had moved to London and made a fortune in the sherry trade. John Ruskin, an only child, was largely educated at home, where he was given a taste for art by his father’s collecting of contemporary watercolours and a minute and comprehensive knowledge of the Bible by his piously Protestant mother. This combination of the religious intensity of the Evangelical Revival and the artistic excitement of English Romantic painting laid the foundations of Ruskin’s later views. In his formative years, painters such as J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and John Sell Cotman were at the peak of their careers. At the same time religious writers and preachers such as Charles Simeon, John Keble, Thomas Arnold, and John Henry Newman were establishing the spiritual and ethical preoccupations that would characterize the reign of Queen Victoria. Ruskin’s family background in the world of business was significant, too: it not only provided the means for his extensive travels to see paintings, buildings, and landscapes in Britain and continental Europe but also gave him an understanding of the newly rich, middle-class audience for which his books would be written. Ruskin discovered the work of Turner through the illustrations to an edition of Samuel Rogers’s poem Italy given him by a business partner of his father in 1833. By the mid-1830s he was publishing short pieces in both prose and verse in magazines, and in 1836 he was provoked into drafting a reply (unpublished) to an attack on Turner’s painting by the art critic of Blackwood’s Magazine . After five years at the University of Oxford, during which he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry but was prevented by ill health from sitting for an honours degree, Ruskin returned, in 1842, to his abandoned project of defending and explaining the late work of Turner. Art criticism. In 1843 Ruskin published the first volume of Modern Painters , a book that would eventually consist of five volumes and occupy him for the next 17 years. His first purpose was to insist on the “truth” of the depiction of Nature in Turner’s landscape paintings. Neoclassical critics had attacked the later work of Turner, with its proto-Impressionist concern for effects of light and atmosphere, for mimetic inaccuracy, and for a failure to represent the “general truth” that had been an essential criterion of painting in the age of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Drawing on his serious amateur interests in geology, botany, and meteorology, Ruskin made it his business to demonstrate in detail that Turner’s work was everywhere based on a profound knowledge of the local and particular truths of natural form. One after another, Turner’s “truth of tone,” “truth of colour,” “truth of space,” “truth of skies,” “truth of earth,” “truth of water,” and “truth of vegetation” were minutely considered, in a laborious project that would not be completed until the appearance of the fifth and final volume of Modern Painters in 1860. This shift of concern from general to particular conceptions of truth was a key feature of Romantic thought, and Ruskin’s first major achievement was thus to bring the assumptions of Romanticism to the practice of art criticism. By 1843 avant-garde painters had been working in this new spirit for several decades, but criticism and public understanding had lagged behind. More decisively than any previous writer, Ruskin brought 19th- century English painting and 19th-century English art criticism into sympathetic alignment. As he did so, he alerted readers to the fact that they had, in Turner, one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art alive and working among them in contemporary London, and, in the broader school of English landscape painting, a major modern art movement. Ruskin did this in a prose style peculiarly well adapted to the discussion of the visual arts in an era when there was limited reproductive illustration and no easy access to well-stocked public art galleries. In these circumstances the critic was obliged to create in words an effective sensory and emotional substitute for visual experience. Working in the tradition of the Romantic poetic prose of Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey, though more immediately influenced by the descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the rhetoric of the Bible, and the blank verse of William Wordsworth, Ruskin vividly evoked the effect on the human eye and sensibility both of Turner’s paintings and of the actual landscapes that Turner and other artists had sought to represent. In the process Ruskin introduced the newly wealthy commercial and professional classes of the English-speaking world to the possibility of enjoying and collecting art. Since most of them had been shaped by an austerely puritanical religious tradition, Ruskin knew that they would be suspicious of claims for painting that stressed its sensual or hedonic qualities. Instead, he defined painting as “a noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.” What that language expressed, in Romantic landscape painting, was a Wordsworthian sense of a divine presence in Nature: a morally instructive natural theology in which God spoke through physical “types.” Conscious of the spiritual significance of the natural world, young painters should “go to Nature in all singleness of heart…having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.” Three years later, in the second volume of Modern Painters (1846), Ruskin would specifically distinguish this strenuously ethical or Theoretic conception of art from the Aesthetic, undidactic, or art-for-art’s-sake definition that would be its great rival in the second half of the 19th century. Despite his friendships with individual Aesthetes, Ruskin would remain the dominant spokesman for a morally and socially committed conception of art throughout his lifetime. 5 Themes in the Works of John Ruskin. We live in interesting technological times. As the 20th century turned into the 21st century, the Information Age took hold. Digital parametric design has changed the face of how architecture is practiced. Manufactured building materials are often synthetic. Some of today's critics caution against today's ubiquitous machine, that computer-aided design has become computer-driven design. Has artificial intelligence gone too far? London-born John Ruskin (1819 to 1900) addressed similar questions in his time. Ruskin came of age during Britain's domination of what became known as the Industrial Revolution. Steam-powered machinery quickly and systematically created products that once had been hand-hewn. High- heating furnaces made hand-hammered wrought iron irrelevant to a new cast iron, easily molded into any shape without the need of the individual artist. Artificial perfection called cast-iron architecture was prefabricated and shipped around the world. Ruskin's 19th-century cautionary criticisms are ones applicable to today's 21st-century world. In the following pages, explore some of the thoughts of this artist and social critic, in his own words. Although not an architect, John Ruskin influenced a generation of designers and continues to be on the must-read lists of today's architecture student. Two of the best-known treatises in architecture were written by John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture , 1849, and The Stones of Venice , 1851. Ruskin's Themes. Ruskin studied the architecture of northern Italy. He observed Verona's San Fermo, its arch being "wrought in fine stone, with a band of inlaid red brick, the whole chiseled and fitted with exquisite precision." * Ruskin noted a sameness in the Gothic palaces of Venice, but it was a sameness with a difference. Unlike today's Cape Cods in Suburbia, architectural details were not manufactured or prefabricated in the medieval town he sketched. Ruskin said: *Section XXXVI, Chapter VII. Rage Against the Machine. Throughout his life, Ruskin compared the industrialized English landscape with the great Gothic architecture of medieval cities. One can only imagine what Ruskin would say about today's engineered wood or vinyl siding. Ruskin said: Dehumanization of Man in an Industrial Age. Who today is encouraged to think? Ruskin acknowledged that a man can be trained to produce perfect, quickly made products, just like a machine can do. But do we want humanity to become mechanical beings? How dangerous is thinking in our own commerce and industry today? Ruskin said: What is architecture? Answering the question "What is architecture?" is not an easy task. John Ruskin spent a lifetime expressing his own opinion, defining the built environment in human terms. Ruskin said: Respecting the Environment, Natural Forms, and Local Materials. Today's green architecture and green design is an afterthought for some developers. To John Ruskin, natural forms are all that should be. Ruskin said: Ruskin in Verona: Artistry and Honesty of the Hand-Crafted. As a young man in 1849, Ruskin railed against cast-iron ornamentation in the "Lamp of Truth" chapter of one of his most important books, The Seven Lamps of Architecture . How did Ruskin come to these beliefs? As a youth, John Ruskin traveled with his family to mainland Europe, a custom he continued throughout his adult life. Travel was a time to observe architecture, sketch, and paint, and continue to write. While studying the northern Italian cities of Venice and Verona, Ruskin realized that the beauty he saw in architecture was created by man's hand. Ruskin said: Ruskin's praise of the hand-crafted not only influenced the Arts & Crafts Movement but also continues to popularize Craftsman-style houses and furniture like Stickley. Ruskin's Rage Against the Machine. John Ruskin lived and wrote during the explosive popularity of cast-iron architecture, a manufactured world he despised. As a boy, he had sketched the Piazza delle Erbe in Verona, shown here, remembering the beauty of the wrought iron and the carved stone balconies. The stone balustrade and the chiseled gods atop the Palazzo Maffei were worthy details to Ruskin, architecture, and ornamentation made by man and not by machine. "For it is not the material, but the absence of the human labor, which makes the thing worthless," Ruskin wrote in "The Lamp of Truth." His most common examples were these: Ruskin on Cast Iron. Ruskin on Glass. Dehumanization of Man in an Industrial Age. The writings of critic John Ruskin influenced social and labor movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Ruskin did not live to see Henry Ford's Assembly Line, but he predicted that untethered mechanization would lead to labor specialization. In our own day, we wonder if an architect's creativity and ingenuity would suffer if asked to perform only one digital task, whether in a studio with a computer or on a project site with a laser beam. Ruskin said: When in his 50s and 60s, John Ruskin continued his social writings in monthly newsletters collectively called Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain . See the Ruskin Library News to download a PDF file of Ruskin's voluminous pamphlets written between 1871 and 1884. During this time period, Ruskin also established the Guild of St George, an experimental Utopian society similar to the American communes established by the Transcendentalists in the 1800s. This "alternative to industrial capitalism" might be known today as a "Hippie Commune." Source: Background, Guild of St George website [accessed February 9, 2015] What is Architecture: Ruskin's Lamp of Memory. In today's throw-away society, do we build buildings to last through the ages or is cost too much a factor? Can we create lasting designs and build with natural materials that future generations will enjoy? Is today's Blob Architecture beautifully crafted digital art, or will it seem just too silly in years hence? John Ruskin continually defined architecture in his writings. More specifically, he wrote that we cannot remember without it, that architecture is memory. Ruskin said: John Ruskin's Legacy. As today's architect sits at his computer machine, dragging and dropping design lines as easily as (or easier than) skipping stones on Britain's Coniston Water, the 19th-century writings of John Ruskin make us stop and think — is this design architecture? And when any critic-philosopher allows us to partake in the human privilege of thought, his legacy is established. Ruskin lives on. Ruskin's Legacy. Created new interest in reviving Gothic architecture Influenced the Arts & Crafts Movement and hand-crafted workmanship Established interest in social reforms and labor movements from his writings on man's dehumanization in an Industrial Age. John Ruskin spent his final 28 years at Brantwood, overlooking the Lake District's Coniston. Some say he went mad or fell into dementia; many say his later writings show signs of a troubled man. While his personal life has titillated some 21st-century film-goers, his genius has influenced the more serious-minded for more than a century. Ruskin died in 1900 at his home, which is now a museum open to visitors of Cumbria. War Gives Birth to Art. All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on Earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people if it remains at peace. There is no art among an agricultural people if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely consistent with fine art, but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle. Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own sake, you must, I imagine, be surprised at my assertion that there is any such good fruit of fighting. You supposed, probably, that your office was to defend the works of peace, but certainly not to found them; nay, the common course of war, you may have thought, was only to destroy them. And truly I, who tell you this of the use of war, should have been the last of men to tell you so, had I trusted my own experience only. Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash. —Winston Churchill, 1939. Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful comparison of the states of great historic races at different periods. The first dawn of it is in Egypt; and the power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation of death, and of future judgment, by the mind of a nation of which the ruling caste were priests, and the second, soldiers. The greatest works produced by them are sculptures of their kings going out to battle or receiving the homage of conquered armies. All the rudiments of art, then, and much more than the rudiments of all science, are laid first by this great warrior-nation, which held in contempt all mechanical trades, and in absolute hatred the peaceful life of shepherds. From Egypt art passes directly into Greece, where all poetry, and all painting, are nothing else than the description, praise, or dramatic representation of war, or of the exercises which prepare for it, in their connection with offices of religion. All Greek institutions had first respect to war, and their conception of it, as one necessary office of all human and divine life, is expressed simply by the images of their guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom of the intellect; he bears the arrow and the bow before he bears the lyre. Athena is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. It is by the helmet and the shield, oftener than by the shuttle, that she is distinguished from other deities. Cornet Wilkin of the 11 th Hussars at camp in the Crimean War, 1855. Photograph by Roger Fenton. United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division, Washington D.C. There were, however, two great differences in principle between the Greek and the Egyptian theories of policy. In Greece there was no soldier caste; every citizen was necessarily a soldier. And, again, while the Greeks rightly despised mechanical arts as much as the Egyptians, they did not make the fatal mistake of despising agricultural and pastoral life, but perfectly honored both. These two conditions of truer thought raise them quite into the highest rank of wise manhood that has yet been reached, for all our great arts, and nearly all our great thoughts, have been borrowed or derived from them. Take away from us what they have given, and I hardly can imagine how low the modern European would stand. Now, you are to remember, in passing to the next phase of history, that though you must have war to produce art, you must also have much more than war—namely, an art-instinct or genius in the people; and that, though all the talent for painting in the world won’t make painters of you, unless you have a gift for fighting as well, you may have the gift for fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the next great dynasty of soldiers, the art- instinct is wholly wanting. I have not yet investigated the Roman character enough to tell you the causes of this, but I believe, paradoxical as it may seem to you, that, however truly the Roman might say of himself that he was born of Mars, and suckled by the wolf, he was nevertheless, at heart, more of a farmer than a soldier. The exercises of war were with him practical, not poetical; his poetry was in domestic life only, and the object of battle, pacis imponere morem . And the arts are extinguished in his hands, and do not rise again, until, with Gothic chivalry, there comes back into the mind of Europe a passionate delight in war itself, for the sake of war. And then, with the romantic knighthood which can imagine no other noble employment—under the fighting kings of France, England, and Spain—and under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, art is born again, and rises to her height in the great valleys of Lombardy and Tuscany, through which there flows not a single stream, from all their Alps or Apennines, that did not once run dark red from battle, and it reaches its culminating glory in the city which gave to history the most intense type of soldiership yet seen among men—the city whose armies were led in their assault by their king, led through it to victory by their king, and so led, though that king of theirs was blind, and in the extremity of his age. And from this time forward, as peace is established or extended in Europe, the arts decline. They reach an unparalleled pitch of costliness, but lose their life, enlist themselves at last on the side of luxury and various corruption, and, among wholly tranquil nations, wither utterly away, remaining only in partial practice among races who, like the French and us, have still the minds, though we cannot all live the lives, of soldiers. The fear of war is worse than war itself. “It may be so,” I can suppose that a philanthropist might exclaim. “Perish then the arts, if they can flourish only at such a cost. What worth is there in toys of canvas and stone, if compared to the joy and peace of artless domestic life?” And the answer is—truly, in themselves, none. But as expressions of the highest state of the human spirit, their worth is infinite. As results they may be worthless, but, as signs, they are above price. For it is an assured truth that, whenever the faculties of men are at their fullness, they must express themselves by art; and to say that a state is without such expression, is to say that it is sunk from its proper level of manly nature. So that, when I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. John Ruskin. From a commencement speech, delivered by England’s most renowned art critic to the cadets graduating from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in December 1865. Ruskin the radical: why the Victorian thinker is back with a vengeance. I t is a familiar tableau of urban Britain. Labourers dig a tunnel, a porter delivers goods, a man swigs beer, there are young children and dogs, police and aristocrats look on; there is dirt and beauty and life all thrown together. Ford Madox Brown’s pre-Raphaelite painting Work (c 1852- 63) has been reworked many times. In the latest effort, the comic artist Hunt Emerson gives it a knockabout cartoon feel, but with a distinctly current edge: the cast is multicultural, the tools more hi-tech and there are allusions to social dysfunction, the gig economy and the housing crisis. Emerson’s update also alludes to the social critiques of Brown’s contemporary and friend, John Ruskin: a writer, artist, social critic, polymath and aesthete. Emerson’s illustration is the central image of A World of . Work, an exhibition at Brantwood, Ruskin’s former home in Cumbria. It also figures in How to Work, a comic made in collaboration with writer Kevin Jackson, and one of three in their recent collection , Bloke’s Progress, a playful re-examining of Ruskin’s ideas through the eyes of a modern everyman, Darren Bloke. Ruskin was born in London in 1819 to a wealthy Scottish wine-merchant father and a strict Evangelical mother. Having graduated from Oxford University in 1842, he came to public prominence with his defence of JMW Turner, published in the first volume of his acclaimed treatise on art, Modern Painters. He gained fame as a public intellectual – writing, teaching and delivering lectures on art, architecture and other subjects, all in his eccentric style. Ruskin’s art criticism and advocacy was a particular inspiration to the pre-Raphaelites. In the 1860s, he turned his attention to politics and society against the backdrop of the inequality and rampant poverty many suffered in the industrial capitalist age. He railed against the exploitation of the poor and the self-interest of the wealthy. Ruskin proposed reform, and carried out practical projects – such as getting his students to work on widening roads in Oxford – which provided a hands-on social parable for his beliefs. While much of his thinking was considered radical, and could be considered a precursor to socialism, he adhered to an older conservative tradition that believed in hierarchy and the established authority; it also suggested that those who naturally held power had a duty to serve and protect the poor. By the mid-20th century, some of his ideas had filtered into the perceived wisdom of the British welfare state. “In some ways, Ruskin seems like the most Victorian of the Victorians, so not applicable to our lives now,” says David Russell, associate professor of English at Corpus Christi College Oxford. “People get hung up on how eccentric some of his ideas were, but the core of his claims remains relevant and important. That is to say: our aesthetic experience, our experience of beauty in ordinary life, must be central to thinking about any good life and society. It’s not just decoration or luxury for the few. If you are taught how to see the world properly through an understanding of aesthetics, then you’ll see society properly.” Ruskin, who died in Brantwood in 1900, has been cited as an influence on William Morris and Gandhi, the arts and craft movement, ecological thinking and the foundations of the welfare state. His most searing social critique is contained in his 1860-62 essays, Unto This Last, in which he takes a scythe to Victorian capitalist values: “the art of establishing maximum inequality in our own favour … the rash and absurd assumption that such inequalities are necessarily advantageous, lies at the root of most of the popular fallacies on the subject of political economy”. In his conclusion, Ruskin states baldly: “Luxury is indeed possible in the future – innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruellest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfolded.” Restorers work on Giotto’s fresco of Saint Rufus, in Assisi, Italy. John Ruskin’s analysis of the artist’s work helped redefine art criticism in the Victorian era. Photograph: Alessia Pierdomenico/Reuters. A central line of thinking for Ruskin, cutting across his art criticism and political writing, is that a society founded on structures that are embroiled in heartlessness – in brutal treatment of people and the environment around them – is indifferent to beauty. As we see the growth of vast inequalities today, such billionaire tech firms employing precarious workers with diminished rights and pervasive environmental ruin, it is not hard to see parallels in our current moment. This year, David Zwirner Books published the long out-of-print Giotto and His Works in Padua, Ruskin’s consideration of the Italian painter’s 12th-century fresco cycle at the Arena Chapel in northern Italy. Even here, when contemplating the beauty of early Renaissance art, Ruskin writes: “As long as it can bear to see misery and squalor in its streets, it can neither invent nor accept human beauty in its pictures.” As Robert Hewison adds in an introduction to the new edition: “Is this 1860, or 2018?” Whether Ruskin remains an influence on the left, however, is another matter. “There is an important echo in contemporary radicalism,” says Jeremy Gilbert, a member of the founding national committee of Momentum and a professor of cultural and political theory at the University of East London. “Ruskin is not really much of a presence in contemporary left culture, but there are definitely resonances, especially in the popularisation of post-work politics.” Ruskin’s criticism of the alienating nature of work and the aesthetic impoverishment of industrial capitalism chimes with current arguments about inequality and the despoiling of the environment. But, for Gilbert, “it’s never clear with Ruskin what the strategy was meant to be politically to resolve the problem.” Where Ruskin’s continuing political influence is concerned, Gilbert says he remains central to an ethical-socialist radical tradition, a belief-system embraced by Tony Benn and even Jeremy Corbyn, whose “own vision of the world is a moral one: it’s not really about class struggles, so much as it is about wanting a moral and ethical society”. While Ruskin is not widely cited by the left today, this concept is something he espoused. Gilbert suggests that the strongest link between Ruskin and contemporary discourse lies in the possibility that automation might be a liberation – allowing people to lead more creative and and aesthetically fulfilled lives because they don’t have to do boring work anymore. In Unto This Last, Ruskin offers, in his elaborate style, exhortations: “The equality of wages, then, being the first object towards which we have to discover the directest available road, the second is … that of maintaining constant numbers of workmen in employment.” There are also provocations: “Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to property of the poor.” And there are dramatic paeans to what might be possible. “There is no wealth but life. Life including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration,” he writes. “That country is richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.” Emma Thompson and Dakota Fanning in Effie Gray, 2011. The film examines the relationship between John Ruskin and his teenage bride. Photograph: Joel Ryan/AP/Press Association Images. When Ruskin did publish his social criticism, there was a backlash from his audience: the wealthy, educated elite. The essays that became Unto This Last were originally published in Cornhill magazine; but he had to end the series because his editor, William Thackeray, along with much of the readership, were horrified, Russell explains. The economic establishment were contemptuous and said he had no practical business insight to draw on. “They thought Ruskin would be providing a guide to art and he provided them with a condemnation of society. But on the same sort of aesthetic principles, [he was] trying to change people’s values, which was what his art criticism was already doing but they didn’t see the continuity so much as were annoyed by his assumptions and how confusing they found it.” The World of Work exhibition in Brantwood, which runs until this weekend, considers how artists have responded to human labour, and is underpinned by Ruskin’s writing on the laissez-faire capitalism of the Victorian industrial age. Alongside Emerson’s update of Work, there is a very broad interpretation: George Mason’s rural idyll The Harvest Moon, John Cassidy’s sculpture The Ship Canal Digger and AS Finlayson’s paintings of an aero-engine production line offer optimistic and noble visions of work. Set against these are stark visions in paintings like Peasant Woman with a Pitchfork by James Pelham and Graham Sutherland’s Press for Making Shells. The exhibition runs into the present day, with images including Jonathan Ive’s design for the iPhone. The David Zwirner Books edition of Ruskin’s writing about Giotto is part of the gallery and publisher’s Ekphrasis series – reissuing largely out-of- print writing on visual arts by the likes of Vernon Lee, Marcel Proust, Alice Michel and Paul Gauguin. “When I was in university, I don’t think I was ever taught Ruskin,” says Lucas Zwirner, the managing editor of the imprint. “In his lifetime he was a celebrity. And then he was totally out of fashion. There’s such richness there that I think there are cycles of engagement – maybe we’re entering a place where people want a different kind of writing about visual art.” John Ruskin’s former home, Brantwood, in Coniston, Lake Disctrict. Photograph: Philip Hoare. Zwirner says he was introduced to the Victorian due to his somewhat unlikely influence on the punk and counter-culture infused drawings of Raymond Pettibon – former Tate director Nicholas Serota also encouraged him to publish the Ruskin work. Ruskin is referenced directly in the title of The Ethics of Dust, a series by the artist, architect and preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos. Here installations are created out of minute dirt, dust and matter that has accumulated over years at old buildings, including Westminster and Doge’s Palace in Venice. “It’s a really important part of the radical tradition to be able to say that one of the things wrong with capitalism in general is that it produces a certain kind of aesthetic degradation,” says Gilbert. “And that does speak to something that really intuitively, people recognise – not just aesthetes, not just intellectuals. Most people have a sense of the way in which corporate culture cannot produce beauty. It can appropriate it and sell access to it, but it can’t produce it.” There is a banner in the Brantwood exhibition that simply reads: “To Do Good Work”. It is by the Sheffield-based art partnership Poly-Technic, which uses words as polemic in its art, riffing on trade union banners and other types of sloganeering, as well as creating collective community projects that take messages out in public. “That was something Ruskin was doing,” says Howard Hull, the director of the Ruskin Foundation and Brantwood Trust. “He was making actions and finding words or concepts which could be taken out and used.“Famously, the first bit of writing that Ruskin ever did was three lines long: a little sermon that his mother got him to preach in the home on a Sunday, in which he stood up and proclaimed: ‘People be good’.”