The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: art, "The Stones of Venice" and "The Seven Lamps of
Architecture," were sent forth.
Then, in 1860, when Ruskin was about forty years old, there
came a great change. His heaven-born genius for making the
appreciation of beauty a common possession was deflected from its
true field. He had been asking himself what are the conditions
that produce great art, and the answer he found declared that art
cannot be separated from life, nor life from industry and
industrial conditions. A civilization founded upon unrestricted
competition therefore seemed to him necessarily feeble in
appreciation of the beautiful, and unequal to its creation.
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