This will be the last of these, as I’ve finished the book, and am now Observing Nietzsche flop-sweat his way through Why I Am So Wise. I kind of want to smack him, but Ruskin has proven a very informative read. For a 19th Century Englishman, he is both articulate and relatively concise. And he… Read More Notes on Ruskin: the Ideal
An intriquing passage from On Art and Life, which nicely explains the aethetic rut that modern art has fallen into: …that great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in saying new… Read More Notes on Ruskin: Modern Art is Anti-Art
Much of Ruskin’s On the Nature of Gothic involves a pre-Marxist critique of industrialization. I’m not sure if it qualifies as being From the Right, as I’m not certain of Ruskin’s politics, but it reads very Romantic, which is at least half a Reactionary movement. The old-school Romantics and Goths gazed back at pre-modern “natural”… Read More Notes on Ruskin: The Absurd Rule
I don’t know what caused Penguin to introduce a Great Ideas series, or by what criteria they determine what ideas are great. I do know that I read Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life, and I enjoyed the packaging as much as the philosophy (Stoicism is a useful ethos, but hard to expand upon. It’s… Read More Notes on Ruskin: The Geography of Gothic
In Ruskin’s On Art and Life, discussion of the features of Gothic archtecture lead to a passage nicely prophetic: From these facts, we may gather generally that monotony is, and ought to be, in itself painful to us, just as darkness is; that an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dead architecture; and of… Read More Brutalism’s Anti-Aesthetic.
Content Blues 