Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Reading Reynolds with Bentham’: The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 2 ‘Prejudice Aside’: Jeremy Bentham's Moral Economy of Taste
- 3 ‘Directing the Art of the Country’: Henry Cole's Laws of Public Taste
- 4 The End of the Experiment
- 5 Taste Between Ethics and Aesthetics
- 6 The Return of Adam Smith
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
6 - The Return of Adam Smith
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Reading Reynolds with Bentham’: The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 2 ‘Prejudice Aside’: Jeremy Bentham's Moral Economy of Taste
- 3 ‘Directing the Art of the Country’: Henry Cole's Laws of Public Taste
- 4 The End of the Experiment
- 5 Taste Between Ethics and Aesthetics
- 6 The Return of Adam Smith
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The art school is engaged in a continuous search for unity-identity which, by composition, cannot exist.
— Raymond Durgnat, ‘Art Schools: The Continuing Malaise’, Art and Artists, October 1969Actors that have similar interests, or that will evolve similarly over a given period of time, will create a cluster, a virtual space that is not based upon the Euclidian drawing of land frontiers but upon lines of common interests and shared objectives.
— Vincent-Emmanuel Mathon, ‘Bentham's Geometrics as Applied to the Internet Age and the Global Economy’, New Directions in Bentham Studies Conference, University College London, 9 December 2011This chapter looks at some options for a political economy of art education in Britain on the hundred-and-seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the School of Design in 1837. In a current situation where an academic/professional ‘education in art’ is divided from a socially directed ‘education through art’, it imagines three options for a new, unified political economy of art education: eudaimonia, ‘nudge’ theory and utilitarianism. Contemporary ‘education through art’ in the UK, as conducted by state-supported museums and galleries, is premised on the steady-state liberal humanism of communities whose ethical frameworks are based on Scottish Enlightenment moral naturalism, even if their sociology is more up to date.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain , pp. 137 - 156Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014