Political Economy Of Art Author:John Ruskin Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. Tub heads of our subject which remain for our consideration this evening are, you will remember, the accumulation and the distribution of works of... more » art. Our complete inquiry fell into four divisions—first, how to get our genius; then, how to apply our genius; then, how to accumulate its results; and lastly, how to distribute them. We considered, last evening, how to discover and apply it;—we have to-night to examine the modes of its preservation and distribution. And now, in the outset, it will be well to face that objection which we put aside a little while ago; namely, that perhaps it is not well to have a great deal of good art; and that it should not be made too cheap. " Nay," I can imagine some of the more generous among you, exclaiming, " we will not trouble you to disprove that objection ; of course it is a selfish and base one : good art, as well as other good things, ought to be made as cheap as possible, and put as far as we can within the reach of everybody." Pardon me, I am not prepared to admit that. I rather side with the selfish objectors, and believe that art ought not to be made cheap, beyond a certain point; for the amount of pleasure that you can receive from any great work, depends wholly on the quantity of attention and energy of mind you can bring to bear upon it. Now, that attention and energy depend much more on the freshness of the thing than you would at all suppose ; unless ' you very carefully studied the movements of your own minds. If you see things of the same kind and of equal value very fre- qnently, your reverence for them is infallibly diminished, your powers of attention get gradually wearied, and your interest and enthusiasm worn out; and you cannot in that state bring to any given work the energy necessary to enjoy it...« less