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
Introduction
- 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 democratic refers, or is at least constantly tending, more and more, to refer every thing to the standard of utility, to the greatest-happiness principle; the aristo-cratical, as much, as far, and as long as possible, to the standard of taste, – constituting itself the arbiter of taste.
— Jeremy Bentham, DeontologyIn an article published in Studio International in 1970, the art historian Norbert Lynton commented on the origins of publicly funded art education in Britain:
the existence of any sort of publicly-financed art education is a very remarkable thing … it proves the survival of a superstition that came in with industrialization, a desire for some sort of insurance policy against the end of civilization.
This book is about how ‘a very remarkable thing’, the art school as a state-funded political experiment, was proposed, developed and then dismantled within utilitarian political economy. The historical boundaries of utilitarian political economy in my text are set by George Berkeley's polemic The Querist of 1735, which agitated for the allocation of state funds to art education in Ireland, and William Stanley Jevons's comments on The Querist in his Political Economy of 1871 and his later attack on the ‘South Kensington’ system of art education in the early 1880s. The main focus of my book is on the role of the legislator in the political economy of art education, through an analysis of Jeremy Bentham's writing on taste, ethics and utility.
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- Information
- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014