Notes from John Dewey: Art as Experience

• The Live Creature

  • Artistic object and the environment from which they emerge are inseparable.

• Having an Experience.

  • Experience (inchoate) and experience (reaches the fulfilment, resolution).
  • Continuous merging of experience (no holes, but sometimes pauses).
  • Unity of experience (a dominant property), train of ideas, which are subtle shadings of a pervasive and developing hue
  • Art denotes a process of doing or making. Craftsmanship (on the side of maker) and esthetic (on the side of consumer). For the making is artistic when it is controlled by its qualities /as perceived/.

• The Expressive Object

  • Consists of both action and its result. Action is not the only constitute, and the final object is not something that has expression on its own, although it is something new and distinctive.
  • (Matisse on representation: the camera was a boon to painters, because it relieved them from necessity of copying objects). Representation means that the work of art tells something to those who enjoy it about the nature of their own experience of the world.
  • The meaning of the work of art. Sign on the road vs the work of art (one states and the other expresses). Science: statements (meaning); art: expression (experience).

• Substance and Form

  • Artist -> work of art -> audience (triadic relation in the language, speaker, things said, one spoken to)
  • Substance and form /(What/ and /how/ is done). What comes first? Pure self-expression without any form vs pure form without any individuality
  • Material (public) and manner of using it (individual)
  • A work of art is recreated every time it is esthetically experienced (sheet music is a recorded work of art that has to be played to be experienced - but that is also true for othe form, e.g. The Parthenon)
  • A work of art elicits and accentuates the quality of being a whole and of belonging to a larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live (and there are no psychological grounds for such properties).

• The Common Substance of the Arts

  • In ordinary visual perception our experience is disperced, mixed with sounds and other colours - while in a painting colour is the only means and therefore it is brought to its extreme
  • Two types of medium: 'mere' medium (a CD player) and media (tones in music). Both of those types are vehicles, but media is something more, they artistically embedded (like movement of the hand and brush, types of paint to the painting)

• The Challenge of Philosophy

  • Esthetic experience is imaginative -> any conscious experience has of necessity some imaginative quality.
  • Steam engine is a physical operation brought into being by human contrivance. Work of art is not like that - it operates imaginatively. It is a challenge for the one who experiences it.
  • The often revealed weakness of an esthetic theory is that the system superimposes some preconceived idea about experience rather than allowing experience to tell its own tale.

  Source: John Dewey. /Art as Experience/. NY, Putnam, 1934.