On Art and Life

"I’m a little bit obsessed with John Ruskin at the moment. He had the idea that mass-produced items – the perfect precision of stones made with machines, for example – were un-Christian and diminished the soul of man. “You must either make a tool of the creature,” he wrote, “or a man of him.” You can’t do both. That means you either create someone who can express an identity, or create a cog in a machine. For me, I don’t share Ruskin’s faith but I think it’s worth asking these questions. He looks for hand-crafted items – and by extension he wants the soul of a person to be important rather than machine tooled. In the context of the digital world, where we use a lot of mass-produced digital technology, we have to ask ourselves whether the uniformity of what we use is diminishing who we are and who we might otherwise strive to be. Once you start a conversation about Ruskin, though, you also have to discuss all the people who loathe Ruskin. Modernists say that Ruskin’s perspective was degenerate, and that ornamentation in design was a sign of a society that was backsliding towards barbarism. That debate is very central, and O n Art and Life is a very short, Penguin Ideas book about Ruskin which will bring you into it. I think you can view the little smart slabs of plastic and glass that we carry about with us as statements of our lack of individuality. We are sold these items as the backend to whichever media company wants to show us content – and they assert a corporate identity of which we become a part."