August 31

Every false work of art that the critics praise is a door through which the hypocrites of art immediately rush in.

1

However strange this might sound, the same thing has happened to the art of our time and our circle that happens to a woman who sells her attractive female qualities, which are intended for motherhood, for the enjoyment of those who lust after such pleasures.

The art of our time and our circle has become a whore. And this comparison is true to the tiniest of details. It, too, is always adorned, always up for sale, always alluring, ruinous and ready.

A true work of art manifests itself only rarely in the soul of the artist, as a fruit of a prior life, in exactly the same way that a mother conceives a child.

On the other hand, as long as there are consumers, false art is produced by masters and craftsmen non-stop.

Like the wife of a loving husband, true art does not need to be adorned. False art, like a prostitute, must be adorned.

The reason for the creation of true art is an inner need to express an accumulated feeling, just as the cause of sexual conception for a mother is love.

The cause of false art is self-interest, just like prostitution.

The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into everyday life, just as the consequence of a wife’s love is the birth of a new human being. The consequence of false art is the corruption of the human being, the insatiability of pleasures and a weakening of the human being’s spiritual forces.

This is what the people of our time and our circle must understand if we are to rid ourselves of the dirty flood of this depraved, whorish art.

2

People’s attempts to earn a livelihood by art are among the worst and most harmful means of doing it. There are a few, a very few persons born in each generation, whose words are worth hearing; whose art is worth seeing. These born few will preach or sing, or paint, in spite of you; they will starve like grasshoppers, rather than stop singing; and even if you don’t choose to listen, it is charitable to throw them some crumbs to keep them alive. But the people who take to writing or painting as a means of livelihood, because they think it genteel, are just by so much more contemptible than common beggars, in that they are noisy and offensive beggars. I am quite willing to pay for keeping our poor vagabonds in the workhouse; but not to pay them for grinding organs outside my door, defacing the streets with bills and caricatures, tempting young girls to read rubbish novels, or deceiving the whole nation to its ruin, in a thousand leagues square of dirtily printed falsehood, every morning at breakfast. If people cannot make their bread by honest labour, let them at least make no noise about the streets; but hold their tongues, and hold out their idle hands humbly; and they shall be fed kindly.

— John Ruskin

3

Genius must not be sold; the sale of it involves the guilt both of simony and prostitution. Your labor only may be sold; your soul must not.

— John Ruskin

Until the merchants are expelled from the temple, the temple of art will not be a temple. The art of the future will drive them out.