Ruskin's ministry of taste

This dissertation examines John Ruskin's definition of taste as it develops from an aesthetic index of individual morality in Modern Painters I and II to a vehicle for the reform of national morality and class structure in his later work. Good taste, in Modern Painters I and II, is primarily an appreciation of God's work, nature, through landscape art. However, by the time Modern Painters V is published, Ruskin's waning religious faith and darkening vision of nature lead him to define taste in a humanistic rather than divine context, no longer focusing on the composition of a painting, but instead on the composition of a human community based on a "political economy of cooperation." Ruskin's focus on human work and the production of goods begins in The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, the roots of a political economy of taste which is given a theoretical basis in Unto This Last. Ruskin relates his theories of taste and consumption to conditions of production in the lectures collected in The Political Economy of Art, The Two Paths, and The Crown of Wild Olive. The emphasis in these works is on the conditions of production necessary to cultivate good taste; the value--material and aesthetic--of goods is contingent upon the physical and spiritual health of the workers producing them. Ruskin continues to refine his theories of taste and political economy in his lectures as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford (1869-1877), in which he attempts to instill a socially responsible taste in Oxford's young aristocrats and gentlemen commoners. During the same period he applies these ideas in the founding of St. George's Guild and the reports on its progress in Fors Clavigera, attempting to establish a hierarchically composed co-operative community.