In this book, I have offered an alternative to the received opinion that the publicly funded art school should be understood as the effects of the steam engine on the Royal Academy of Arts, an opinion which maintains that the art school ‘came in with industrialization’. The alternative I have presented is that an adequate differentiation of the academy and the art school requires that the art school is seen as the Royal Academy of Arts plus the principle of utility, in other words the Royal Academy of Arts viewed from within an architecture of interested perceptions. I have examined this question of an adequate differentiation between the academy and the art school from the standpoint of the inadequate differentiation initiated by the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835–6, and Henry Cole's response, which abandoned laissez-faire political economy in favour of an intervention that placed particular emphasis on the role of the legislator in defining taste as public work. I have also shown that the problem of differentiating the academy and the state art school is antecedent to the advent of industrialization, and begins with George Berkeley's moral distinction between the duty of industry and the register of industry, whose legacy is in the moral impossibility of the academicians in the art school referred to by Henry Cole.