'I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.' So, infamously, the Victorian critic John Ruskin expressed his condemnation of James McNeil Whistler's phantasmagorical Nocture in Black and Gold of 1875. The libel action that ensued led to an apparently nominal victory for the artist -- he was awarded damages of just one farting -- but in reality it gave him much more: a platform from which to plead the rights of artists to express themselves, unfettered by critical constraints, and to raise the war cry of aestheticism-- 'are for art's sake'.
“我聽聞了許多傲慢的英國佬，但從未期望聽到何這樣的闊少對一幅描繪兩百多名大眾面容的畫作投注目光。“ 這是英國藝評約翰羅斯金對詹姆斯.惠思勒在1875年“黑與金“中，變幻無常的鋼琴曲風所下的批評。這類看似有名無實的誹謗，卻使藝術家獲得勝利--他只得到一個臭名--現實上他得到的更多-- 一個為藝術家自己辯護陳述的平台，從批評解放，並引發藝術超然論的大肆討論--“藝術所以藝術的理由“。
Ruskin's utter incomprehension of Whistler's work is nothing unusual. Each successive age see a restaging of the battle between artist and critic, in which the latter--often mirroring conservative public taste -- cries out in horror and disdain at the supposed excesses of a new and assertive generation of artists. In our own time we witness the constant wringing of critical hands at the latest artistic atrocity: a pickled shark, a urine-soaked canvas, an unmade bed. The conflict is timeless and beyond resolution because it is motivated by a fundamental disagreement on the most basic of questions: what is art?
