7   The Gothic and Computer Art

Margaret A. Boden

7.1   Introduction

At first sight—and maybe on further examination, too—computer art (C-art) and the Gothic are worlds apart. Twenty-first-century technology and medieval cathedrals: what can these things possibly have in common? Even if they could be shown to share some features, surely the differences between them are immeasurably greater?

And anyway, who cares? Why does it matter? Computer art is worlds apart from stone axes, too—but why would anyone bother to say so?

Well, they would not. No one has centered an entire account of art on Neolithic axes. The Gothic, however, is different. One hugely influential aesthetic theory takes it as the pinnacle of art. Moreover, this theory has entered so deeply into our culture that certain aspects of it are widely regarded as simple common sense. Accordingly, people who have principled or prejudiced reservations about the enterprise of C-art often base their criticism on the many differences between these two genres.

Comparing them carefully, then, may help us understand the widespread suspicion of computer art that is found in the art world (see chapter 8). It may enable us to see some (largely unsuspected) continuities between them. It may even help us understand, at least for some cases, why a computer artist has chosen to endow his or her artworks with this feature or that one.

7.2   Treading in Ruskin’s Footsteps

When people speak of Gothic art today, they are sometimes referring only to architecture: buildings rich with pointed arches under steeply gabled roofs and perhaps with grotesque gargoyles. Often, however, they mean dark near-horror stories in literature or film—like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights or Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Or they may be thinking of music with a wildly depressing emotional tone. They may even have in mind deliberately ghoulish fashions in dress, jewelry, and cosmetics.

But what do wild passion and black lipstick have in common with gables and pointed arches? Today’s arrestingly somber Gothic clothing is utterly unlike the colored jerkins, elegant wimples, and flowing gowns of medieval times. So why are all these very different things given the same label? The answer lies in the concept of Gothic art defined by John Ruskin (1819–1900) a century and a half ago.

Ruskin’s 1853 essay “On the Nature of Gothic Architecture” first appeared as a chapter tucked away inside the second volume of his hugely detailed treatise The Stones of Venice. But it did not stay tucked away for long. It was reprinted as a separate item—with a laudatory introduction by William Morris—only a year later and has remained in print ever since. It has long outlasted the fact-filled introductory chapters, which were reissued many times as guides “for the use of travellers while staying in Venice and Verona” (Ruskin 1854). And it has influenced aesthetics very widely. Its message was potentially relevant not merely to architecture or Venice but to art in general.

Ruskin was not the first to recommend Gothic styles in architecture. Claiming that the destruction of civilized Rome by the barbarian Goths had led Renaissance thinkers to use “Gothic” as “a term of unmitigated contempt” (1854, 4), he allowed that Gothic styles had recently been “vindicated” by the antiquaries and architects of his own century. One of those architects was Augustus Pugin, who had initiated the nineteenth-century revival of medieval styles in architecture and in internal decoration too (Clark 1962). The wallpapers, furniture, and door carvings in the Houses of Parliament today were mostly designed by Pugin. And Pugin himself had been preceded by Johann von Goethe (1980), whose essay on Strasbourg Cathedral had favored Gothic style over neoclassicism.

Nor was Ruskin’s influence needed for the rise of the Gothic approach in literature. Horace Walpole had written The Castle of Otranto almost a century earlier, and Emily and Charlotte Bronte had respectively published Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre several years before The Stones of Venice went to press (Hogle 2002). Moreover, Romanticism (and Goethe) had long celebrated the sublime wildness of “Nature” and the creative freedom of the human spirit—both key themes in Ruskin’s writing.

In those senses, then, he was going with the tide: following the taste of the time, not forming it. But he did offer something genuinely new: an explicit defense of Gothic as the very paradigm of art, supported by a savage denunciation of the effects of the Industrial Revolution—alias the machine—on art makers.

Ruskin was not just categorizing; he was prescribing. He saw the Gothic as the best type of art, the pinnacle of human achievement. All other forms were inferior. This was not a matter of superficial beauty: visual glories, he admitted, had been offered by Assyrian, Egyptian, Romanesque, and Renaissance art too. Rather, it had to do with the human and cultural values expressed (often unselfconsciously) in artworks by the people who made them.

Ruskin’s concept of art makers was also unusual. It included unknown stonemasons and carvers as well as the famous artists named in the history books and romanticized as geniuses in garrets. In other words, his aesthetics respected craftworks as well as fine art. Plato, too, had classified artists and craftsmen together, as makers of objects requiring techne, or skill (Gorgias 503e). But the rise of fine art (and professional artists) as a social institution since the Renaissance had driven a cultural wedge between the two. Ruskin’s approach implied that, to the contrary, there is no fundamental distinction between them.

There is, in fact, a distinction here but not one that can be used to assign every artifact to one class or the other (Boden 2000). Craftworks draw on evolved perceptual affordances, whereas fine art involves creative processes that exploit rich cultural, not evolutionary, resources. But these differing psychological mechanisms can occur in the mind simultaneously and so generate many mixed or borderline cases.

Tellingly subtitled “And Herein of the True Functions of the Workman in Art” (my italics), this key essay was an impassioned argument that the only art truly worthy of respect is informed by the idiosyncrasies of the individual artist or worker who freely, and pleasurably, created it with his own hands. In other words, the primary focus was not on visual styles (pointed arches and the like) or even on the religious beliefs visually depicted in them (angels, mangers, Madonnas, and so on) but on the moral-psychological climates within which art objects arise and that make them possible. Only Gothic art, grounded in Christian beliefs and values, Ruskin argued, respected the creativity of every human individual instead of degrading humble workers into machines.

A few years later, his allegiance to dogmatic Christianity, and especially to the evangelical Protestantism in which he had been raised, was shattered (Landow 1971, chap. 4, sect. ii). And his sensitivity to art was partly responsible. He had doubted the literal truth of the Bible ever since he was fourteen and the existence of an afterlife as a young adult. But one Sunday in 1858 he became, as he put it, “a conclusively un-converted man.” He attributed this to two contrasting experiences during a visit to Turin. The first was his being “overwhelmed” by Paul Veronese’s painting Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, which celebrated sensuous—and sensual—beauties decried by Protestantism; the second, just a few hours later, was the joyless sermon preached in the gloomy fundamentalist chapel nearby, promising eternal damnation to all who failed to share the beliefs of the twenty souls gathered there. But his Christian commitment to the dignity of every human individual remained. If anything, it grew even stronger.

It was this aspect of his thought that spread Ruskin’s views way beyond aesthetics, narrowly defined. His chapter influenced not only art criticism but politics too. Others before him had denounced industrialization, of course—William Blake, for one. But Ruskin focused especially on its demeaning sociocultural effects for manual laborers, insisting that society’s elite—including all true lovers of art—should approach them and their works of art or craft not only with human sympathy but also with profound respect.

One important artist and social thinker who was inspired by these thoughts was William Morris. He and Ruskin were the key founders of the Arts and Crafts movement, still visible today in the flourishing tradition of craftwork in Great Britain (and its down-market offshoots in village craft fairs and National Trust shops). They were crucial, too, within several protosocialist political groupings that eventually led to the rise of the Labour Party.

In addition, they encouraged the formation of anti-industrial communes focused on traditional self-sufficiency. Now, such communities are largely justified in terms of scientifically based ecological or environmental concerns. But their original impetus was a deep-rooted suspicion, even rejection, of “the machine.” Ruskin and Morris were not the first to provide inspiration here: Charles Fourier and Robert Owen (both born in the early 1770s), for instance, predated them. But they provided additional, and powerful, ammunition for the cause.

Over and over again, in his chapter on the Gothic (and elsewhere), Ruskin bemoaned mechanization’s growing influence on many aspects of culture. Even more than its potential for misery-making social upheaval of various kinds (rural despoliation, mass relocation to city slums, and uncongenial work patterns such as night shifts), he rued the tendency for industrialization to degrade the workman into the image of the machine. Indeed, he projected this notion backward in time when criticizing much preindustrial art: his prime complaint about classical and neoclassical architecture, as we see in section 7.4, was that it had forced the artisans (workmen) of previous centuries to behave almost as though they were machines, not free and fallible human beings.

Clearly, then, no one could be less sympathetic to the ethos of computer art than Ruskin. “So what?” you may ask. “Why should we care about the views of this long-dead Victorian worthy?”

The reason is that they underlie much of the suspicion of C-art that holds sway in the art world and especially among the general public today (see chapter 3). Many of his ideas about art are now taken for granted by people who have never even heard of him.

That is not to say that his passion for the Gothic style was shared by all who came after him: a leading art historian remembers that in the 1920s it was “a kind of architecture which everyone agreed was worthless” (Clark 1962, 2). At that time, of course, minimalist and abstract art were in the ascendant. Nor is it to say that his stress on art making was echoed by all. It was countered, for instance, by the aesthetics of pure form developed by Roger Fry (described by the same historian as “incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin” [Clark 1949]) and also by Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and all other ready-mades.

Still less is it to say that his ideas are right (and this chapter does not argue that they are). However, they are so widespread that most readers will probably have some sympathy with them.

It is worth asking, then, whether any type of C-art can be defended in light of his position. In short, does his work imply that computer art is an inescapably inferior form of art or, worse still, a deeply deceptive illusion, not really art at all?

7.3   The Six Principles of Gothic Art

Ruskin defined Gothic art in terms of six principles. Or rather, he identified two parallel sets (1–6 and 1′–6′) concerning art objects and art making, respectively. In other words, the six or twelve principles referred not only to the perceptible features of the finished artwork but also—and more important—to the spirit in which it was made. In particular, they were focused on how this art making reflected the humanity (including the religious and political culture) of the artist or artisan as an individual.

In order of importance, said Ruskin, the six overt characteristics of Gothic architecture were (1854, 4)

1. Savageness
2. Changefulness
3. Naturalism
4. Grotesqueness
5. Rigidity
6. Redundance

Those perceptible features, he said, characterize Gothic buildings. As applied to the builders (artisans and artists), instead of the buildings (art objects), they were psychological rather than purely aesthetic. Considered as “moral elements,” they were

1′.  Savageness, or Rudeness

2′.  Love of Change

3′.  Love of Nature

4′.  Disturbed Imagination

5′.  Obstinacy

6′.  Generosity

Lacking any one or two of these principles, Ruskin said, an artwork could nevertheless be regarded as Gothic. But absence of the majority of them would exclude it. In fact, the criteria are not mutually independent, as Euclid’s axioms are: taking the first one seriously leads to all the rest. For Ruskin, such exclusion would imply that it was an inferior artwork—although it might be a perfect instance of an inferior type of art.

His explanations of what he meant by his definition of Gothic took up many pages of delectably purple prose. Those pages were necessary because his parallel lists (1–6 and 1′–6′) must be interpreted with caution. As we will see, some of the everyday words used in them were intended in an unusual way. “Rigidity,” for example, did not mean what is normally understood as rigidity; “Generosity” did not quite mean generosity; and “Obstinacy” did not mean obstinacy.

It followed from Ruskin’s six principles—or rather, it was a presupposition of all of them—that Gothic art should “both admit the aid, and appeal to the admiration, of the rudest as well as the most refined minds” (34). Given his position as a highly refined member of the Victorian elite, this attitude is perhaps surprising. But it was all of a piece with his protosocialist politics.

In applying his ideas to C-art, we must bear in mind three dimensions: what he said about the style and content of artworks, what he said about the artists and artisans who made them, and what he said about the general accessibility of art.

A caveat, before we begin: Sections 7.4–7.9 consider the extent to which C-art satisfies Ruskin’s six principles. The question of whether C-art is, indeed, art is taken up in section 7.10—where we see that Ruskin himself would not have allowed that it is and that his followers today do not do so either.

7.4   Savageness

The “unmitigated contempt” for Gothic architecture that lasted from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century had been largely driven, Ruskin said, by aversion to its “rude and wild” nature. One might have expected him to counter that apparently unflattering description. On the contrary, however, he insisted on it: “It is in this very character that it deserves our profoundest reverence” (1854, 4). In other words, the first—and, he said, the most important—principle of Gothic art is Savageness, or Rudeness.

The wildness of the landscape and climate of northern Europe (“mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor … splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift” [5]) was compared favorably to the “great peacefulness of light … laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue” of Syria, Greece, Italy, and Spain. The “shaggy” wolf, bear, and Shetland pony were similarly favored over the “multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures” of Africa and the Mediterranean. And whereas southern architecture naturally employed “burning gems” and “smooth [soft-sculptured] jaspar pillars,” the northern workman must “with rough strength and hurried stroke, smite an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland.” In short, Savageness involved “creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life” (6).

These deserved from us “no reproach … but all dignity and honourableness.” Gothic architecture also possessed a “higher nobility” when considered as “an index, not of climate, but of religious principle.” In other words, the Savage style and material of Gothic art (principle 1) was paralleled by the Savage human spirit that made it (principle 1′). And there “Savageness” was contrasted with “servility.”

Servility or its lack was visible in the manner of ornamentation employed in the artwork. The most servile school of art, he said, was that of classical Greece. Here, “the execution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect of the higher.” Because perfection was required, ornamentation was reduced to “mere geometrical forms—balls, ridges, and perfectly symmetrical foliage.” These could be made with absolute precision “by line and rule”—so that the workman was, in effect, “a slave” (6).

Medieval cathedrals, by contrast, neither showed nor demanded such regularity and perfection. This was only partly due to the recalcitrance of the materials. It was due also, he said, to the Christian religion, which recognizes the individuality, and the fallibility, of every human soul. Each workman can do his own thing—but he will very likely do this imperfectly (“rudely”). And those imperfections, as evidence of the human freedom that led to them, are to be valued for their own sake. Indeed, “the principal admirableness” of the Gothic cathedrals was that they were made by “the labour of inferior minds, and out of fragments full of imperfection …, [which] raise up a stately and unaccusable whole” (7). So an aesthetics that demands perfection is an inferior aesthetics. It did not follow that maximal Savagery or Rudeness produces the best art, for superior minds make fewer errors: “Delicate finish is desirable from the greatest masters, and is always given by them” (11).

Christianity implies that even inferior minds are worthy of respect and capable of improvement: “[In] every man, however rude and simple, whom we employ in manual labour, there are some powers for better things: some tardy imagination, torpid capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought. … But they cannot be strengthened … unless we prize and honour them in their imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill” (7).

It follows that we should take a certain attitude toward workmen, in whatsoever sphere—an attitude that was all too rare in Victorian England (and, dare I say it, also today). “What we have to do with all our labourers,” he said, is “to look for the thoughtful part of them.” Inevitably, if we do that, we will see errors. If you encourage a workman to think for himself, as opposed to always (for instance) cutting a perfectly straight line, “his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong.” But if you do allow this freedom, “you [will] have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool. … Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once” (8; italics added).

Accordingly, his rejection of the then-popular neoclassical style—“a wearisome exhibition of well-educated imbecility” (7n)—was based not only on a critique of the visible forms involved (blandly perfect rather than “rudely” interesting; see principle 1) but also on a complaint about the diminished experience of the workmen who made them (principle 1′). These artisans had been denied the opportunity to exercise creativity in their work and to take pride in it accordingly. Neoclassicism had thus involved “the degradation of the operative into a machine” whose only pleasure in his work was to gain wealth (9).

Expressing this in political terms, Ruskin declared, “The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all … for this—that we manufacture there everything except men; … to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit never enters into our estimate of advantages” (10). And the remedy, he said, is for the moneyed classes to consider “what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy.”

They may then adapt their habits of consumption, being prepared “[to sacrifice] such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; [and to demand] the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.” So we should “never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share” (10). Moreover, because self-directed manual labor is intrinsically honorable, no one should avoid it: “The painter should grind his own colours; the architect work in the mason’s yard with his men; the master-manufacturer be himself a more skilful operative than any man in his mills” (13).

Clearly, it was no accident that Ruskin was a hero to early socialists and to the Arts and Crafts movement too. But can he be a hero for C-artists as well? Can he even be seen as a sympathetic voice?

His stress on the value of imperfections in artworks sits uneasily with computer art. To be sure, imperfections and errors can occur in C-art: see the discussion of the Grotesque in section 7.7. Nevertheless, C-art aims for and often achieves a certain kind of perfection. In Ruskin’s terms, then, it counts as an inferior type of art. However, so do classical and neoclassical art, as we have seen. And so do more modern forms, such as Abstract art, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Conceptual art—none of which satisfies his six principles.

Computer art faces an extra hurdle, which most (although not quite all) other examples of modern art do not have to negotiate. Namely, it is thought of as machine made rather than manmade. This flies in the face of Ruskin’s assumptions about art in general and also challenges his emphasis—in principles 1 and 1′—on the hand of the human maker.

“Hand,” here, is meant literally. Ruskin’s respect for manual labor—which he recommended for everyone—did not prevent his also valuing intellectual work. C-art involves plenty of that—and “Invention,” too (see chapter 10.) But he did attribute a special dignity to manual labor, and the work of C-artists does not usually involve that. Finger tapping on keyboards does not count. Robotic art, or R-art (see chapter 2), is an exception: Edward Ihnatowicz’s Senster, for instance, drew much of its aesthetic impact from its hand-engineered Meccano-like frame (Zivanovic 2005). In general, however, the work required for C-art is intellectual rather than manual.

Ruskin made great play of the fact that manual labor (stone masonry, for instance) leaves the marks of the individual workman on it. Those marks do not pronounce merely that some human being made the object but that this (perhaps anonymous) human being made it. Anyone else would have done it somewhat differently. As he put it, “In a design which cannot be mathematically defined, one man’s thoughts can never be expressed by another” (12). Here, he was thinking of the impossibility of carrying out instructions from a master artist of the Gothic (as opposed to classicism) without thereby adding one’s own mark. But the point generalizes to the master artists themselves. Indeed, the stylistic differences found within a Gothic cathedral were due, he said, to there being successive architects over the years.

At first sight, this criterion, too, sits uneasily with computer art. Indeed, some of the early C-artists thought as much and embarked on C-art precisely to minimize—or, in Paul Brown’s case, even to lose—their own personal signature. But it turned out that, for very general psychological reasons, this was much easier said than done (Boden 2010). Even using the randomizing methods of Evo-art may not entirely destroy the personal traces of the original artist (see also chapter 5). In short, C-artists, like cathedral architects, leave marks of their individuality in their work. That is especially true of CA-art, in which the formative hand of the human artist is nearer. But it applies to CG-art as well.

As we have seen, Ruskin had political reasons for lauding manual labor and for conflating the categories of art and craft. He wanted to resist Victorian society’s tendency to value only people who do intellectual work (or, of course, none at all). In his words, “We are always in these days endeavouring to separate [manual labour from intellect]; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas [each should be doing both], and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense” (12).

Here, C-art is not in a strong position. It not only rarely involves nonintellectual labor but is done primarily (only?) by highly educated people. The increasing spread of personal computers and the growth of Net-art (see chapter 2), may ameliorate this to some extent. But it will remain true that only a relatively privileged group of people will have the opportunity to do C-art. That is so whether we consider only professional C-artists or also people doing Net-art in their leisure time (as Ruskin would have put it, “by the wayside”).

That fact relates to the third dimension of comparison between the Gothic and computer art: their general accessibility. Can C-artworks be understood and appreciated by the public at large? This question is explored at length in chapter 4. Here, let us just note that some aspects of the appreciation of C-art may not be possible for people with no knowledge of programming or of how the computer system involved actually works. Insofar as that is so, C-art is elitist to a degree that Ruskin would not have approved and that did not apply to his beloved cathedrals.

7.5   Changefulness

Ruskin defended Changefulness, or variety, in two ways: sociopolitical and aesthetic (14–19).

On the one hand, he saw it as an inevitable consequence of “allowing independent operation to the inferior workman,” which should be done “simply as a duty to him” (14). For “wherever the workman is utterly enslaved, the parts of the building must of course be absolutely like each other; for the perfection of his execution can only be reached by exercising him in doing one thing, and giving him nothing else to do” (14). We have only to look at a building of classical Greece, for instance, to see that “all the capitals are alike, and all the mouldings unvaried,” which shows that “the degrading [of the Greek workman] is complete.” By contrast, the freedom of the Gothic workman is evident in the “perpetual change both in design and execution” of the medieval cathedrals.

On the other hand, perpetual variety in architecture is intrinsically rewarding for those who experience it, if they are not brainwashed by academic or neoclassical architects into scorning it. The Gothic cathedrals, he argued, show exceptional stylistic variety. In part, this was because, over the decades, a new architect would take over on another’s death. But it was primarily due to principle 2′ on his list, the “Love of Change” that he saw as being peculiar to the Gothic spirit. This was “a strange disquietude, … [a] restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied” (19).

His readers, he said, had been taught to value the predictability of the classical triglyph furrow (part of a Doric frieze) over the diversities of fretwork. But they were willing to appreciate variety in “every other branch of art.” What they needed to learn was to enjoy “reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas” (15). For “great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stone, does not say the same thing over and over again; … to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble than it is of genius in print; and we may … require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.”

Thus far, C-artists might well agree. Although their love of change might be less pressing than the Gothic love of Change. After all, a CG-art program typically generates indefinitely many different, and unique, works. Indeed, this is a large part of the point of the exercise (which is why CG-art is ill suited to expressing highly particular emotional experiences; see chapter 4). And the official catalog of the pioneering Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition made a point of saying that it showed “the links between the random systems employed by artists, composers and poets, and those involved in the use of cybernetic devices” (Reichardt 1968, 5). Moreover, many C-artists since then have used randomness as a key feature of their work.

But some have not. Ernest Edmonds, for example, says, “In my mind, randomness … is inherently uninteresting. My goal was to make work that is complex enough to be engaging, but not so complex as to seem random” (2008, 351). In other words, variety and unpredictability are to be valued, but not if they arise merely from randomness. Ordered complexity can be engaging or, as Ruskin put it, “entertaining.”

Here, however, we encounter a glaring disagreement between C-artists (whether or not they use randomness) and Ruskin. For Ruskin went on to say what he declared to be self-evident: “Nothing is a great work of art, for the production of which either rules or models can be given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, it is not an art, but a manufacture” (16). What he had in mind were the five orders of architecture, defined by Academicians, and Corinthian, Doric, and Ionic capitals. A good architect, he said, should no more aim to reproduce these faithfully than a good painter would copy heads and hands from Titian.

Ruskin was not, and still is not, the only one to think it self-evident that art cannot be entirely rule driven. Immanuel Kant (1952, sect. 46), for example, had insisted that no definite rule can capture artistic genius. Many people will grant that art can, to some extent, be rule based. Any artistic style is, in effect, a system of generative rules whose potential is explored by artists (Boden 2004). But because many details are not specified by the style, room is left for significant variety in the art objects.

That variety is widely taken as evidence that strict, exceptionless rules are not in play. This evidence, however, is not conclusive. As Edmonds’s remark implies, rule-based complexity—if complex enough—can lead to unpredictable and aesthetically “engaging” variety. Moreover, the phenomenon of the artist’s personal signature suggests that there are extrastylistic rules, specific to individual artists, that select one variation rather than another during the execution of the work (Boden 2010). Ruskin himself pointed out that “every successive architect, employed upon a great [cathedral], built the pieces he added in his own way, utterly regardless of the style adopted by his predecessors” (18).

He assumed, of course, that the variety arises primarily from the free spontaneity of the human artist—something that can never be understood by science or modeled in machines. I say primarily because he allowed that some of the variety in Gothic architecture results from “practical necessities” (18; italics added). Many people today would agree with him. For them, CA-art leaves room for the exercise of human freedom, but CG-art does not. Or rather, the CG-artist acts freely in writing the program (see chapter 10), but the subsequent generation of the art object by the program is a matter of rules, not freedom.

This is not the place for a computational analysis of human freedom (but see Boden 2006, 7.i.g; Dennett 1984). Suffice it to say that Ruskin’s belief about the (ruleless) origin of variety in art, despite his claim to self-evidence, is not obviously true.

7.6   Naturalism

By Naturalism, Ruskin meant “the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws” (19). So the highly stylized leaves and flowers of Eastern art, although admittedly beautiful, were—for him—aesthetically inferior to the more realistic foliage seen in Gothic art.

What counts as representing nature “frankly” is not clear. It does not imply slavish copying, so it leaves many stylistic options open. In Ruskin’s day, it ran from carefully depicting every dewdrop on a peach (as in a sixteenth-century Dutch still life) and every petal in every flower (as in a medieval tapestry or a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood) to giving a seemingly wild, yet realistic, impression of a sunrise (as in a canvas by William Turner). Mimesis, in other words, can be achieved in very different ways.

Jumping 150 years, to our day, do any examples of C-art represent nature frankly? Arguably, several stages of Harold Cohen’s line-drawing AARON program aimed to do so—with increasing success. And AARON, of course, is an example of CG-art, not CA-art. It owes nothing to the real-time guidance of the artist’s hand.

Even the relatively minimalist AARON of the early 1970s suggested 3-D solidity (weighty rocks scattered around), and occlusion was soon added. AARON’s pictures of the 1980s contained human figures in realistic attitudes; for instance, an acrobat balancing tiptoe on a medicine ball would have arms extended in a physically plausible way. The acrobats’ faces, however, were merely formulaic, and there was no overt depiction of the ground plane. By the late 1980s, human figures could be placed among broadly realistic jungle foliage, with the ground plane now filled appropriately. Next, a different type of human figure became possible, with self-occlusion—someone’s arm lying across the person’s own body, for example—and very much more detailed faces. The latest versions of AARON are less realistic, the focus now being on color, not human or floral figures; even so, these seemingly abstract images still carry a suggestion of 3-D foliage.

The acrobat line drawings are reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Vollard Suite: minimalist cartoons rather than full-fleshed portraits. Ruskin would not have regarded them as representing nature “frankly.” And he would have been even more critical of Picasso’s distorted bulls and human bodies and faces. But one might want to say that AARON’s human-figure drawings, and the Vollard images too, are frank and nearly full representations of nature. They are not aiming at every-petal accuracy, to be sure. But they are aiming at, and achieving, some degree of verisimilitude.

One form of C-art, namely VR-art (defined in chapter 2), does sometimes aim for every-petal accuracy. Or rather, it sometimes aims for every-petal depiction while also ensuring that some aspect of the virtual world is perceptibly unlike the real world. An extreme example is the animated teddy bear in Steven Spielberg’s (appallingly bad) film AI, every one of whose thousands of hairs is individually depicted and individually movable. In principle, a VR-artist enthralled by the wonders of Nature could offer us computer-generated (CA or CG) lions, butterflies, or dinosaurs represented on that level of detail. Only in principle, however; because achieving such highly detailed VR is inordinately complex and expensive, and so it is not something that a lone artist or a small art group could undertake. But the main point stands: VR-art can express “the love of natural objects for their own sake” and can exemplify “the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws.”

Some other cases of CG-art can be seen as celebrations of nature and even as realistic depictions of it. Several (Evo-art) examples of this attitude can be mentioned in relation to Generosity. However, these are—at best—frank, not full. Judged by principles 3 and 3′, they are much inferior to Gothic art.

With respect to the dimension of accessibility, all these examples of CG-art (and comparably realistic examples of CA-art) can be appreciated by the general public. Spielberg’s teddy bear, like Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, was enjoyed by many millions. And Richard Brown’s Mimetic Starfish—a CI-art installation wherein a huge starfish seemed to be trapped inside a transparent table, moving (in lifelike ways) in response to the voices and movements of the people around it—attracted large audiences when exhibited in London’s Millennium Dome; it was even described in the Times (London, January 8, 2000) as “the best thing in the Dome.” Whether computer art works depicting or celebrating nature can be near fully appreciated by the public, as a Pre-Raphaelite painting (for instance) can, is another matter. Again, the issues involved here are explored in chapter 4.

7.7   The Grotesque

The fourth aesthetic principle named by Ruskin was the Grotesque, defined as “the tendency to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime [i.e., beautiful], images” (32).

Put like that, there seems to be no reason why C-art could not encompass the Grotesque. Even CG-art could satisfy this desideratum. If AARON had been programmed to depict gryphons instead of acrobats or heads composed of vegetables (after Giuseppe Arcimboldo) instead of realistic faces, the results would have been fantastic and ludicrous for sure. William Latham, arguably, has already succeeded (Todd and Latham 1992). One of his Evo-art projects generates myriad images of strangely shaped and rainbow-colored creatures, resembling nightmarish marine invertebrates even more bizarre than gryphons. And VR-artists could “delight” in computer-generated worlds containing not only unfamiliar experiences (such as flying or activating highly unnatural causal chains) but “fantastic and ludicrous … images” as well.

As for CA-art, in which the initial images and the modifications are provided by the artist, there is even less of a problem. A graphics program such as Photoshop can be applied to any image, whether fantastical or beautiful or simply banal.

But when giving the definition of Grotesque, Ruskin added that this tendency toward the grotesque is “a universal instinct of the Gothic imagination.” Why did he insist on it? Could someone not delight in gables and pointed arches without also delighting in the grimacing gargoyles and fabulous beasts around them?

His answer lay in the moral-psychological interpretation of the principle: in 4′ rather than in 4. “Disturbed Imagination” did not mean hallucinations or madness. On the contrary, Grotesque (i.e., “fantastic and ludicrous”) imagery inevitably arises in everyday, artisanal creativity and is appreciated by creator and viewer alike because of the recognition of the humanity of the art maker. To reject it because it is not “beautiful” would be to show scant respect for the workman involved. This was not just a question of good manners, of avoiding insult to someone of an inferior social status whose “artistical efforts must be rough and ignorant, and their artistical perceptions comparatively dull” (48). The Grotesque is positively valuable as an expression of human individuality and fallibility.

In other words, fellow feeling with another human being, not academicians’ principles of beauty, should ground our aesthetic response: “However much we may find in [nonprofessional art or craft] needing to be forgiven, [it is] always delightful so long as it is the work of good and ordinarily intelligent men. And its delightfulness ought mainly to consist in those very imperfections [italics in source] which mark it for work done in times of rest. … It is to the strength of [the viewer’s] sympathy, not to the accuracy of his criticism, that it makes appeal” (49; italics added).

The Grotesque can also be valued because of the playful or humorous intent that often lies behind it: “Now it is not possible, with blunt perceptions and rude hands, to produce works which shall be pleasing by their beauty; but it is perfectly possible to produce such as shall be interesting by their character or amusing by their satire. For one hard-working man who possesses the finer instincts which decide on perfection of lines and harmonies of colour, twenty possess dry humour or quaint fancy … because these are exercised in our daily intercourse with each other, and developed by the interest we take in the affairs of life, while the others are not” (48; italics added).

Twentieth-century art offers many examples of “fantastic and ludicrous” graphics driven by “dry humour or quaint fancy.” Some of these are inspired by science fiction or fantasy novels. Less exotic (less Grotesque) examples include Beryl Reid’s paintings of bars and dance halls, Donald McGill’s saucy seaside postcards, and Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Were he alive today, Ruskin would not laud these things (largely because they are not sufficiently naturalistic; see principles 3 and 3′). But he would probably be less snobbish about them than many self-professed art lovers are. He had little patience with elitist attitudes that refuse to treasure the Grotesque alongside the conventionally beautiful: “No man can indeed be a lover of what is best in the higher walks of art, who has not feeling and charity enough to rejoice with the rude sportiveness of hearts that have escaped out of prison, and to be thankful for the flowers which men have laid their burdens down to sow by the wayside” (49).

Admittedly, Reid, McGill, and Disney had not escaped from the “prison” of industrialized manual labor, and they did not produce their work “by the wayside” (at leisure). Mickey Mouse and Reid’s dancers were professionally produced, not casually whittled at the fireside like a child’s pennywhistle. So Ruskin might well criticize their art more sternly than that of uneducated amateurs when it fails to satisfy conventional criteria of Naturalism or beauty. But as ever, his basic criticism would be of the artists (for not fulfilling their human potential despite their many social advantages), not of the Grotesquerie of the artworks considered in themselves; that is, principle 4′ rather than 4.

What of computer art, in this context? Ruskin saw three aspects of human artistry reflected in the Grotesque: error, humor, and playful fantasy. The last of these can be expressed in CG-art, as the example of Latham’s disturbing creepy-crawlies attests. Images much less “fantastic” than these can also be seen as the result of playfulness, albeit in pursuit of a specific artistic goal. Even relatively minimalist CG-art, such as Edmonds’s ever-changing color juxtapositions, can be seen as playful although not as fantasy.

Humor is more difficult to translate into CG terms. It is more likely to be expressed in images of human beings or animals—their interactions or their facial expressions—than in images of inanimate objects or abstract patterns. Although the latter is also possible: the impulse to anthropomorphize the movements of even highly abstract images is very strong (Heider and Simmel 1944; Weir 1974). In principle, The Painting Fool (described in chapter 6) could be nudged toward generating humorous images—perhaps by basing some of the facial distortions that are made by the program on anatomical caricature rather than on exaggerated emotional expression. Indeed, caricature-drawing programs may already exist.

But here we run up against the principle 4 versus 4′ distinction again. A program that automatically enlarges a face’s ears, whenever it notices that the (real) ears are somewhat larger than usual, is not being driven by “dry humour” or “interest in the affairs of life.” Possibly the C-artist responsible for it was so driven. But will the audience respond to its CG-images accordingly? The more suspicious they are of C-art in general, the less likely they are to read genuine humor into the computer graphics.

There is genuine humor in many animations, of course—Mickey Mouse, for one. But Mickey was hand drawn, frame by painstaking frame. Computerized animation tools, such as programs that generate the intermediate stages between one body attitude and another, can produce humorous results. However, the initial and final images have to be carefully chosen, and the in-betweening algorithm may have to be specially adapted too. So these examples are best thought of as CA-art wherein the humor comes almost directly from the human artist.

As for error, there is one sense in which this is impossible within C-art. The program (any program) does what its instructions tell it to do. That is true even if there is a bug in it. In brief, programs cannot make errors.

But people can. And C-artists are as prone to human error as anyone else. Occasionally, the error is clear—and also (as Ruskin suggested) endearing. For instance, an early program written by John Lansdown (a cofounder of the Computer Arts Society) generated choreographic sequences for fencing duels. When these were interpreted by Shakespearian actors, accustomed to performing choreographed duels, they were surprisingly realistic—except that, every so often, one actor would stand still with his arms spread, leaving his body wide open to attack. This was extremely funny to watch, and part of the charm was that it clearly had not been intended by Lansdown. Moreover, anyone who had ever done any programming, howsoever elementary, could sympathize with him.

However, people with no experience of programming tend to think, wrongly, that bugs are caused only by gross stupidity or carelessness on the programmer’s part, which limits the human sympathy elicited on observing them. Lansdown’s unprotected duelers will then seem idiotic rather than charming.

Even more to the point, it is often more difficult than in the dueling case for the C-art audience to recognize the C-artist’s errors. As discussed in chapter 4, appreciation of C-art involves some understanding of the computational processes that underlie the perceptible artwork. As Ruskin knew, most of us can recognize the mark of a clumsy chisel and can sympathize because we have been guilty of such clumsiness ourselves—whether in practiced wood carving or in childish potato cuts. But comparatively few people have done computer programming. Many CA-artists have not done it either; as Cohen has put it, “People today are consumers of computers, not producers” (personal communication). Even if they have, the C-artist’s original intention may not be so clear as in the dueling example, so noticing that there has been an error—never mind identifying its source—is tricky. It follows that Grotesque effects may occur in a work of C-art but not be recognized (or, of course, appreciated) as such by the audience.

Whether they are recognized or not, unintentional errors will occur in C-art. Intentional “errors” may occur too. Indeed, they may occur precisely to satisfy the Disturbed Imagination of the human audience. So one early C-art feature was a process for converting clear, clinical CG-lines into believably hand-drawn—that is, imperfect—lines (Vince 2008, 372).

An even earlier (midcentury) suggestion was a CAD/CAM program for designing carpets, envisaged by the German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse (Zuse 1993, 130). He recommended that the program allow for deliberate flaws in the weaving to make the carpets appear handmade and thus (on Ruskin’s aesthetics) more valuable. These deliberate imperfections, however, were not really errors. They were fake errors, comparable to the holes made in fake antiques by woodworm guns. The Grotesque was being imitated, not instantiated. Ruskin would not have approved.

7.8   Rigidity

For anyone wanting to bring C-art under the protective aesthetic umbrella of the Gothic, the fifth principle, Rigidity, looks—at first—like a godsend. After all, if error and fallibility sit uneasily with CG-art, rigidity (i.e., lack of flexibility) seems all too apt a description.

That need not be so for CA-art or for those cases of CI-art in which changes in the human participant’s behavior can prompt very surprising variations in the result. And maybe it is not so for Evo-art (see chapter 5). But for noninteractive, nonevolutionary CG-art, which explores a given style without ever transforming it into another, inflexibility is the name of the game. Variability and surprise there may be, in the sense that many different artworks can be generated by one and the same program. But they are all rigidly confined to the chosen style.

However, Ruskin himself admitted that “rigidity,” in its normal meaning, did not accurately express his fifth principle and neither did any other. What he meant by Rigidity was “not merely stable, but active rigidity; the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to resistance, which makes the fiercest lightning forked rather than curved, and the stoutest oak-branch angular rather than bending, and is as much seen in the quivering of the lance as in the glittering of the icicle” (32).

Primarily, he was thinking of architecture—of the transmission of force in buildings and how this may be made visible in the structure or ornamentation concerned. So he contrasted the “passive” stones of Greek architecture, which stand “by their own weight and mass,” with the “elastic tension and communication of force from part to part” that is found in the vaults and traceries of Gothic cathedrals. Similarly, he contrasted the “surface” and “flowing” ornamentation of ancient Greece and Egypt with the medieval ornament that “stands out in prickly independence, and frosty fortitude, jutting into crockets and freezing into pinnacles; here starting up into a monster, there thorny, bossy, and bristly … but, even when most graceful, never for an instant languid” (32).

It is not clear how one would apply that principle to traditional arts other than architecture, never mind C-art. Even C-art focused on 3-D design may lie outside its scope if it does not deal with physical forces (Latham’s weightless 3-D graphics, for example). When C-art involves architectural design, this principle could conceivably come into play—given explicit reference to stress and support as in some CAD programs. But many architectural programs, such as one that generates plans and elevations for Palladian villas (Hersey and Freedman 1992), ignore physics. Ruskin would have criticized the Palladian program for that reason and also because he rejected neoclassicist style.

R-art could conceivably show Rigidity if the artistic emphasis was on the robot’s physical construction and its quasikinesthetic properties. A newly designed Senster, for instance, might bear ornamentation that somehow reflected its physical dynamics. Perhaps a robot that was “thorny, bossy, and bristly … but, even when most graceful, never for an instant languid” might fit the bill. And maybe some future version of the Australian artist Stelarc’s human-robot hybrids will do this too (Smith 2005). But these imaginary comparisons are too far-fetched to be readily plausible.

So much for Ruskin’s principle 5. As for 5′ (Obstinacy), the cast of mind that Andrea Palladio presumably lacked, this word too was understood by Ruskin in an unusual way.

Obstinacy, for him, involved “the habit of hard and rapid working; the industry of the tribes of the North, quickened by the coldness of the climate, and giving an expression of sharp energy to all they do …; the habit of finding enjoyment in signs of cold …; and [of rejoicing] in the leafless as well as the shady forest.” This cast of mind, he said, not only favors “the softness of leafage nourished in all tenderness” but also “finds pleasure in dwelling upon the crabbed, perverse, and morose animation of plants that have known little kindness from earth or heaven, but, season after season, have had their best efforts palsied by frost, their brightest buds buried under snow, and their goodliest limbs lopped by tempest” (32–33).

This curious paean to cold and tempest echoes the homage to Savageness expressed in principle 1. But Ruskin had more to say about Obstinacy. It involves, he concluded, overall, “strength of will, independence of character, resoluteness of purpose, impatience of undue control, and [a] general tendency to set individual reason against authority [as opposed to] the languid submission, in [warmer climes], of thought to tradition” (33).

All this had a strongly religious aspect: it was no accident, he thought, that “the Protestant spirit of self-dependence and inquiry” was developed in northern Europe. Moreover, he said, this spirit of “philosophical investigation, of accurate thought … [and] of stern self-reliance” was traceable in the distinctive features of Gothic architecture: in “the veined foliage, and thorny fretwork, and shadowy niche, and buttressed pier, and fearless height of subtle pinnacle and crested tower” (34).

Whether or not independence of thinking is especially visible in these aspects of Gothic architecture (I am not persuaded), this cast of mind is only marginally germane to C-art.

All CG-artists need “accurate thought,” to be sure, and many join in “philosophical investigation” regarding art and, in the case of Evo-artists, life (see Boden 1999). Furthermore, any new form of art challenges “authority,” and its practitioners often need “stern self-reliance” to persevere with an approach that is nearly universally scorned (Gardner 1993). Chapter 3 records some of the difficulties that C-artists have had to face in presenting their work to the authority of the art world. Someone wholly lacking in Obstinacy, then, is not well suited to be a C-artist. And C-artists could, of course, use their art to challenge received views—on religion or anything else. But beyond that, principle 5′ is irrelevant.

7.9   Redundance and Generosity

The last and least important (because often absent from Gothic architecture) of Ruskin’s aesthetic principles were Redundance in the artwork and Generosity in the art maker. In a word, this boiled down to ornamentation. Had he lived to see the emergence of minimalist art in the early twentieth century, he would have bemoaned its failure to satisfy this sixth principle.

Redundance, for Ruskin, is “the uncalculating bestowal of the wealth of [the workman’s] labour” (34). Even though the aesthetic effect of much superb Gothic architecture depends primarily on “loveliness of simple design and grace of uninvolved proportion,” our appreciation of the most characteristic examples depends also—sometimes almost wholly—on “accumulation of ornament” (34). So lacy traceries and fretwork in wood and stone and a profusion of statues and gargoyles are not mere optional extras: they are crucial to the aesthetic effect. The reason, said Ruskin, is that everyone, including the “rudest” minds, can warm to these things. By contrast, it takes a certain educational level to appreciate the uncluttered lines of classicism.

In the artist and artisan, Generosity (6′) is a habit of thought that humbly provides a rich display of ornamentation. (One might cite Ruskin’s own joyously flowery prose.) “Humbly,” because it does not assume that every line of its art work is perfect. As Ruskin put it, “No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple” (34). The workman’s “inferior rank,” he added, is often shown “as much in the richness as the roughness of his work.” Besides “winning the regard of the inattentive,” this richness has the good effect of hiding many of the work’s imperfections.

But that seems more like prudence than generosity: why should the best architects and stonemasons need to multiply ornamentation? Ruskin’s answer was to turn from principle 6 to 6′ and to gloss Generosity as “a magnificent enthusiasm, which feels as if it could never do enough to reach the fullness of its ideal; an unselfishness of sacrifice, which would rather cast fruitless labour before the altar than stand idle in the market; and, finally, a profound sympathy with the fullness and wealth of the material universe, rising out of [the Naturalism of principle 3]” (34).

His reference to “the altar” reminds us that the paradigms of Gothic art are the medieval cathedrals. In principle, computer artists could be deeply religious, and use their work to reflect their belief. And C-artists could certainly display both “magnificent enthusiasm” and “sympathy with the fullness and wealth of the material universe.” So when Evo-artists celebrate the wonders of biological nature in their art (as opposed to merely borrowing its mechanism for other artistic purposes), they are showing Generosity in Ruskin’s sense. Examples include Jon McCormack in his artworks Eden and Future Garden and Karl Sims in his Panspermia and Aquazone DeLuxe.

Much C-art, however, is decidedly un-Generous in spirit, and non-Redundant in form. Computer art that delights in visual mathematics, whether simple lines or fractal complexities, is more closely allied to the Bauhaus than to Westminster or Chartres. Indeed, some early C-artists were initially drawn to the genre because they were already committed to modernism, whose heroes—from Walter Gropius to Piet Mondrian—eschewed Generosity too. Examples include Edmonds and Paul Brown.

In sum, Generosity can be found in C-art, but it is not a universal characteristic. Indeed, the mathematical rigor that is built into C-art’s medium, the computer, provides strong temptations against it.

7.10   Coda

This chapter opens with the thought that computer art and the Gothic are worlds apart, that artworks produced with modern technology can have little or nothing in common with medieval cathedrals. We have seen that they do not have nothing in common. However, we have also seen that computer art, in practice or sometimes in principle, rarely satisfies more than one or two of Ruskin’s principles. To the extent that C-art fails to measure up to his criteria of the Gothic, Ruskin would judge it to be inferior.

Or rather, if he were willing to regard it as art at all, he would judge it to be inferior. We must now ask whether he would be prepared to see it as art in the first place.

Ruskin’s remarks about the workman in his chapter in The Stones of Venice implied that all art, whether superior or inferior, is made by human beings. And elsewhere he said, “[The artist] is pre-eminently a person who sees with his eyes, hears with his ears, and labours with his body, as God constructed them; and who, in using instruments, limits himself to those which convey or communicate his human power, while he rejects all that increase it” (1875, chap. 2, sect. iv; italics added). He was not thinking about computers, of course. But he was thinking about electricity (and steam power). He continued, “Titian would refuse to quicken his touch by electricity; and Michael Angelo to substitute a steam-hammer for his mallet. Such men not only do not desire, they imperatively and scornfully refuse, either the force, or the information, which are beyond the scope of the flesh and the senses of humanity” (Ruskin 1875, chap. 2, sect. iv; italics added).

That passage alone shows that he would not have been a cheerleader for computer art as art. In rejecting the computer as a suitable instrument for artists, he would even have denied the possibility of CA-art, never mind CG-art. He would have regarded both these activities as species of manufacture, not art.

The computer’s renowned—and, by C-artists, celebrated—ability to “increase human power” significantly would make it unacceptable to Ruskin. Admittedly, his claim that the artist “labours with his body” seems to refer to physical actions, such as wielding a paintbrush or a mallet. But his insistence that we refuse any information that is beyond the scope of the senses appears to outlaw increased mental powers as well. In short, being made by the direct force of the human hand was a defining characteristic of art for Ruskin. And this criterion was heavily underlined by the Arts and Crafts movement that he cofounded with Morris.

Had he lived to see C-art, he might have admitted that some of it is beautiful. But as we have seen in considering his six “moral elements” (principles 1′–6′), the style or content of an artwork is not, primarily, what makes it significant as art. What gives it artistic quality, rather, is its ability to communicate the freedom, values, and experiences of the artist or artisan who made it and, in so doing, to excite our fellow feeling with that other human being.

For Ruskin, the humanity of the artist was crucial. Even a degraded humanity—as in an artist debased by machinelike stylistic rules or perhaps by a morally evil culture (think of Nazi propagandist art, for instance)—was enough to qualify a work as genuine, albeit inferior, art.

That was not a new idea, but Ruskin’s writings gave it a greater force. And many writers after him have made similar claims, although they may have put it in terms, for instance, of emotion rather than cultural values: see the discussion of Robin Collingwood in chapter 6. (An intriguing historical tidbit is that Collingwood’s father was Ruskin’s secretary and all three are buried alongside one another in Coniston churchyard.) Moreover, some philosophers of aesthetics have specifically cited Ruskin in claiming that art is by definition made by, and for, human beings, and expresses or communicates human experience of some kind. Anthony O’Hear, for instance, quotes this passage from Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture: “[An artwork’s] true delightfulness depends on our discovering in it the record of thought and interest, and trials, and heart-breakings—of recoveries and joyfulness of success; all this can be traced by a practised eye: but, granting it even obscure, it is presumed or understood; and in that is the worth of the thing” (O’Hear 2008, 127–128; italics added).

O’Hear’s essay is of interest here for another reason too. He addresses the question of whether, on his (and Ruskin’s) view, so-called computer art is genuine art. He concludes, because of the lack of direct and continuous guidance from a human hand, that it is not. It is called art only as an “honorific title.” In brief, it is parasitic on real art, in which we do encounter some other human being (O’Hear 2008, 133, 136).

Because O’Hear does not discuss any specific examples of C-art work, it is not clear whether he would accept certain instances of CA-art as real art. Quoting Ruskin again, he says that the art making of a great painter “is at every instant governed by a direct and new intention” (O’Hear 2008, 130; italics added). Interpreting that literally would exclude much CA-art (and all CG-art, of course) or any wherein the artist’s guidance is not continuous (“at every instant”) but sporadic. The only CA-art that could satisfy this criterion is that wherein the artist’s monitoring is continuous and can lead at any instant to intervention on his or her part. But even that concession ignores that not every aspect of the developing work can be affected by the human artist’s intervention.

A further difficulty arises with respect to whether such interventions are “direct” or express “a direct intention.” Does someone who uses sugar tongs to pick up a lump of sugar pick it up directly? And does someone who uses a computer instruction (whether newly written on the fly in LC-art or already available in the CA-program) to change some aspect of an image do so directly? Ruskin, presumably, would answer no. We have already seen that he would reject the use of the computer as an artist’s instrument.

In sum, Ruskin would not have described C-art as an inferior type, to be set alongside Greek or neoclassical and Egyptian art, and judged, like them, in comparison with the Gothic. Applying the six principles to computer art, as done sections 7.4–7.9, would be misguided or irrelevant. For him, C-art is not inferior art because it is not art at all.

Many people today agree with that. But this philosophical view is often mixed with empirical beliefs about just what C-art can or cannot be like. Our discussion of the six principles shows that many of these beliefs are false, or only partly true, or true only of certain types of C-art, or sometimes true in practice but false in principle.

Finally, rejection of C-art is also often supported by social-political misgivings about what Ruskin called the machine. Here, his critique is less easily countered.

Industrial society has degraded human experience in many ways, despite providing material advantages and liberating us from much physical and mental labor. And over the last half century, computers, initially developed for the military-industrial complex (Boden 2006, 11.i.a–c), have played a large role in this. Given computers’ many insidiously dehumanizing applications (some of which are far from obvious), C-artists do not have to be working for the military to be accused of having les mains sales (11.i.d).

But that, as they say, would take us into another ballpark.

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