Art as Experience (1934) is John Dewey's major writing on aesthetics, originally delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard (1932). Dewey's aesthetics have been found useful in a number of disciplines, including the 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).

Overview

Dewey's theory, here, is an attempt to shift the understandings of what is important 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’.

Such a change in emphasis does not imply, though, that the individual art object has lost significance; far from it, its primacy is clarified: the object is recognized 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.

This is a dramatic expansion of the bounds of aesthetic philosophy, for it demonstrates the connections of art with everyday experience and in so doing reminds us 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, finally, to emphasize what is apolitical or impractical or otherwise marginal about that experience; rather, 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.'

See his Experience and Nature for an extended discussion of 'Experience' in Dewey's philosophy.

Chapters

The Live Creature

The Live Creature and Ethereal Things

Having an Experience

The Act of Expression

The Expressive Object

Substance and Form

Natural History of Form

Organization of Energies

The Common Substance of the Arts and the Varied Substance of the Arts

The Human Contribution

The Challenge to Philosophy

Criticism and Perception

Art and Civilization

See also

• List of publications by John Dewey

Notes