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
5 - Taste Between Ethics and Aesthetics
- 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
He requested gentlemen to look at the speech of Mr [Edmund] Burke, to which he referred, and which, independently of its relevancy on this occasion, must be read with pleasure by every man of taste.
— Sir Philip Francis, House of Commons, 16 April 1806These modest judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure.
— Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of RewardIn my introduction, I referred to Norbert Lynton's comments on the origins of publicly funded art education in Britain. Lynton asserted that the state-funded art school was both the product of industrialization and a reaction to the loss of cultural cohesion with the advent of this new mode of production. Lynton hedges his bets by suggesting that industrialization ushers in changes, which in turn prompt a culturally conservative reaction against those changes, an ‘insurance policy against the end of civilization’. However, George Berkeley's proposal in The Querist for a political experiment in publicly funded art education was not a response to a change in modes of production. It was a political experiment that attempted to harness economic power to the promotion of public virtues. In this case, the art school begins with the promotion of the virtue of industry, not with a change in the mode of production brought in by industrialization; it is a political necessity with an economic dimension.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain , pp. 119 - 136Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014