Dewey on Art as Experience

Updated 27. June 2016 – Jon Hoem

Based on Richard Field's writings about John Dewey's aesthetics in Internet Encyclopedia of Philisophy.

Dewey argues that the roots of aesthetic experience lie in commonplace experience that are almost ubiquitous in human life. Aesthetic enjoyment is not a privilege of the few. Aesthetic quality may be found in all aspects of life whenever there is an immediately enjoyed qualitative unity of meanings and values, drawn from previous experience and present circumstances – what Dewey called having "an experience."

The creative work of an artist is not something Dewey consider as unique. The process found in the creative work of artists, is also to be found in all intelligent and creative human activity. What distinguishes artistic creation is the relative stress laid upon the immediate enjoyment of unified qualitative complexity as aim of the activity itself, and the ability of the artist to achieve this aim by marshalling and refining resources found in human life, meanings, and values. The senses play a key role in artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation. Dewey, however, argues against the view, stemming historically from the sensationalistic empiricism of David Hume, that interprets the content of sense experience simply in terms of the traditionally codified list of sense qualities, such as color, odor, texture, etc., divorced from the funded meanings of past experience. Dewey insisted that emotion is not the most significant content of the work of art, but he clearly understands emotion to be the crucial tool of the artist's creative activity. It is not only the sensible qualities present in the physical media the artist uses, but the wealth of meaning that attaches to these qualities, that constitute the material that is refined and unified in the process of artistic expression. The artist concentrates, clarifies, and vivifies these meanings in the artwork. The unifying element in this process is emotion – emotion that is reflected upon and used as a guide to the overall character of the artwork.

Dewey repeatedly returns in Art as Experience to a familiar theme of his critical reflections upon the history of ideas, namely that a distinction too strongly drawn too often sacrifices accuracy of account for a misguided simplicity. When introducing Dewy's aesthetics Field highlights two applications of this theme:

• Dewey rejects the sharp distinction often made in aesthetics between the matter and the form of an artwork.

• What Dewey objected to was the implicit suggestion that matter and form stand side by side, as it were, in the artwork as distinct and precisely distinguishable elements. For Dewey, form is better understood in a dynamic sense as the coordination and adjustment of the qualities and associated meanings that are integrated within the artwork.

• Dewey also rejects a distinction between the artist, as the active creator, and the audience, as the passive recipient of art. This distinction does in effect suggest that artistic processes end with finalised artifacts, as outcome of artists' creativity. Dewey argues that the agency of the appreciator, as an active assimilator of the artist's work, is required. The audience recapitulate many of the same processes of discrimination, comparison, and integration that are present in the artist's initial work, but guided by the artist's perception and skill.

  • Dewey emphasizes this point by distinguishing between the "art product,", the artefact created by the artist, and the "work of art" proper, which is only realized through the active engagement of an audience.

At the end of Art as Experience Dewey devote a chapter to the social implications of art. Art is a product of culture, and it is through art that the people of a given culture express the significance of their lives, as well as their hopes and ideals. Because art has its roots in the consummatory values experienced in the course of human life, its values also have an affinity to commonplace values.

Dewey's specific target in the last chapter was the conditions of workers in industrialized society, conditions which force upon the worker the performance of repetitive tasks that are devoid of personal interest and afford no satisfaction in personal accomplishment. The degree to which this critical function of art is ignored is a further indication of what Dewey regarded as the unfortunate distancing of the arts from the common pursuits and interests of ordinary life.