Art as Experience (1934) is John Dewey's major writing on aesthetics, originally delivered as the first William James Lecture at Harvard (1932). Dewey's aesthetics have been found useful in a number of disciplines, including new media.
Dewey had previously written articles on aesthetics in the 1880s and had further addressed the matter in Democracy and Education (1915). In his major work, Experience and Nature (1925), he laid out the beginnings of a theory of aesthetic experience, and wrote two important essays for Philosophy and Civilization (1931).Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Overview Dewey's theory is an attempt to shift the understandings of what is essential and characteristic about the art process from its physical manifestations in the ‘expressive object’ to the process in its entirety, a process whose fundamental element is no longer the material ‘work of art’ but rather the development of an ‘experience’. Experience is something that personally affects one's life. That is why these theories are so crucial to people's social and educational life.
Such a change in emphasis does not imply, though, that the individual art object has lost significance; far from it, its primacy is clarified: one recognizes an object as the primary site for the dialectical processes of experience, as the unifying occasion for these experiences. Through the expressive object, the artist and the active observer encounter each other, their material and mental environments, and their culture at large.
The description of the actual act of experiencing is drawn heavily from the biological/psychological theories Dewey expounded in his development of functional psychology. In Dewey's article on reflex arc psychology, he writes that sensory data and worldly stimulus enter into the individual via the channels of afferent sense organs and that the perception of these stimuli is a summation:
The biological sensory exchange between man, whom Dewey calls 'the Live Creature' in Art as Experience, and the environment, is the basis of his aesthetic theory:
This quotation is a dramatic expansion of the bounds of aesthetic philosophy, for it demonstrates the connections of art with everyday experience and in doing so reminds people of the highest responsibilities that art and society and the individual have always owed to each other:
To emphasize what is aesthetic about an experience is not to highlight what is apolitical or impractical or otherwise marginal about that experience; instead, it is to emphasize in what ways that experience, as aesthetic, is a 'manifestation, a record, and celebration of the life of a civilization, a means for promoting its development' and, insofar as that aesthetic experience relates to the kinds of experiences had in general, it is also the 'ultimate judgment upon the quality of a civilization.'Art as Experience p. 326
See his Experience and Nature for an extended discussion of 'Experience' in Dewey's philosophy.
Chapters
The Live Creature John Dewey offers a new theory of art and the aesthetic experience. Dewey proposes that there is a continuity between the refined experience of works of art and everyday activities and events, and in order to understand the aesthetic one must begin with the events and scenes of daily life. This idea stands in opposition to the aesthetic theories presented by Immanuel Kant and also the proponents of German Idealism, which have historically been shown to favor certain heavily classicized forms of art, known commonly as 'High Art' or Fine Art. Dewey argues for the validity of 'popular art' stating:
The continuity of aesthetic experience must be recovered with the normal processes of living. It is the duty of the theorist to make this connection and its implications clear. If art were understood differently by the public, art would gain in public esteem and have wider appeal.
His criticism of existing theories is that they "spiritualize" art and sever its connection with everyday experience. Glorifying art and setting it on a pedestal separates it from community life. Such theories actually do harm by preventing people from realizing the artistic value of their daily activities and the popular arts (movies, jazz, newspaper accounts of sensational exploits) that they most enjoy, and drives away the aesthetic perceptions which are a necessary ingredient of happiness.
Art has aesthetic standing only as it becomes an experience for human beings. Art intensifies the sense of immediate living, and accentuates what is valuable in enjoyment. Art begins with happy absorption in activity. Anyone who does his work with care, such as artists, scientists, mechanics, craftsmen, etc., are artistically engaged. The aesthetic experience involves the passing from disturbance to harmony and is one of humans' most intense and satisfying experiences.
Art cannot be relegated to museums. There are historic reasons for the compartmentalization of art into museums and galleries. Capitalism, nationalism and imperialism have all played a major role.
The Live Creature and Ethereal Things The title of the chapter is taken from John Keats who once wrote, in a letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon,
In Dewey, this statement can be taken several ways: the term 'ethereal' is used in reference to the theorists of idealist aesthetics and other schools that have equated art with elements inaccessible to sense and common experience because of their perceived transcendent, spiritual qualities. This serves as a further condemnation of aesthetic theory that unjustly elevates art too far above the pragmatic, experiential roots that it is drawn from.
Another interpretation of the phrase could be that the 'earth and its contents' being, presumably, the ingredients to form 'ethereal things' further expounds the idea of Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics. In other words, the 'earth and its contents' could refer to 'human experience' being used to create art, (the 'ethereal things') which, though derived from the earth and experience, still contains a godly, creative quality not inherent in original creation.
Addressing the intrusion of the supernatural into art, mythology, and religious ceremony, Dewey defends the need for the esoteric in addition to pure rationalism. Furthermore, the human imagination is seen by Dewey to be a powerful synthesizing tool to express experience with the environment. Essentially, rationality alone can neither suffice to understand life completely or ensure an enriched existence.
Dewey writes that religious behaviors and rituals were
Art and (aesthetic) mythology, according to Dewey, is an attempt to find light in a great darkness. Art appeals directly to sense and the sensuous imagination, and many aesthetic and religious experiences occur as the result of energy and material used to expand and intensify the experience of life.
Returning to Keats, Dewey closes the chapter by making reference to another of Keats's passages,
Concerning the passage, Dewey addresses the doctrine of divine revelation and the role of the imagination in experience and art.
Having an Experience John Dewey distinguishes between experience in general and "an" experience. Experience occurs continually, as people are always involved in the process of living, but it is often interrupted and inchoate, with conflict and resistance. Much of the time people are not concerned with the connection of events but instead there is a loose succession, and this is non-aesthetic. Experience, however, is not an experience.
An experience occurs when a work is finished in a satisfactory way, a problem solved, a game is played through, a conversation is rounded out, and fulfillment and consummation conclude the experience. In an experience, every successive part flows freely. An experience has a unity and episodes fuse into a unity, as in a work of art. The experience may have been something of great or just slight importance.
Such an experience has its own individualizing quality. An experience is individual and singular; each has its own beginning and end, its own plot, and its own singular quality that pervades the entire experience. The final import is intellectual, but the occurrence is emotional as well. Aesthetic experience cannot be sharply marked off from other experiences, but in an aesthetic experience, structure may be immediately felt and recognized, there is completeness and unity and necessarily emotion. Emotion is the moving and cementing force.
There is no one word to combine "artistic" and "aesthetic," unfortunately, but "artistic" refers to the production, the doing and making, and "aesthetic" to appreciating, perceiving, and enjoying. For a work to be art, it must also be aesthetic. The work of the artist is to build an experience that will be experienced aesthetically.
The Act of Expression Artistic expression is not "spontaneous." The mere spewing forth of emotion is not artistic expression. Art requires long periods of activity and reflection, and comes only to those absorbed in observing experience. An artist's work requires reflection on past experience and a sifting of emotions and meanings from that prior experience. For an activity to be converted into an artistic expression, there must be excitement, turmoil and an urge from within to go outward. Art is expressive when there is complete absorption in the subject and a unison of present and past experience is achieved.
There are values and meanings best expressed by certain visible or audible material. Appetites know themselves better when artistically transfigured. Artistic expression clarifies turbulent emotions. The process is essentially the same in scientists and philosophers as well as those conventionally defined as artists. Aesthetic quality will adhere to all modes of production in a well-ordered society.
The Expressive Object The fifth chapter Dewey turns to the expressive object. He believes that the object should not be seen in isolation from the process that produced it, nor from the individuality of vision from which it came. Theories which simply focus on the expressive object dwell on how the object represents other objects and ignore the individual contribution of the artist. Conversely, theories that simply focus on the act of expressing tend to see expression merely in terms of personal discharge.
Works of art use materials that come from a public world, and they awaken new perceptions of the meanings of that world, connecting the universal and the individual organically. The work of art is representative, not in the sense of literal reproduction, which would exclude the personal, but in that it tells people about the nature of their experience.
Dewey observes that some who have denied art meaning have done so on the assumption that art does not have connection with outside content. He agrees that art has a unique quality, but argues that this is based on its concentrating meaning found in the world. For Dewey, the actual Tintern Abbey expresses itself in Wordsworth's poem about it and a city expresses itself in its celebrations. In this, he is quite different from those theorists who believe that art expresses the inner emotions of the artist. The difference between art and science is that art expresses meanings, whereas science states them. A statement gives directions for obtaining an experience, but does not supply an experience. That water is tells how to obtain or test for water. If science expressed the inner nature of things it would be in competition with art, but it does not. Aesthetic art, by contrast to science, constitutes an experience.