Art as Experience (1934) is John Dewey's major writing on aesthetics, originally delivered as the first William James Lecture at Harvard (1932).
Dewey had previously written articles on aesthetics in the 1880s and had further addressed the matter in Democracy and Education (1915).
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: This sensory-motor coordination is not a new act, supervening upon what preceded.
It occurs to change the sound…The resulting quale, whatever it may be, has its meaning wholly determined by reference to the hearing of the sound.
Civilization is uncivil because human beings are divided into non-communicating sects, races, nations, classes and cliques.
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.
[9]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.
Apart from organs inherited from animal ancestry, ideas and purpose would be without a mechanism of realization...the intervention of consciousness adds regulation, power of selection, and redisposition...its intervention leads to the idea of art as a conscious idea- the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of humanity.
[10]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.
Dewey writes that religious behaviors and rituals were enduringly enacted, we may be sure, in spite of all practical failures, because they were immediate enhancements of the experience of living…delight in the story, in the growth and rendition of a good yarn, played its dominant part then as it does in the growth of popular mythologies today.
[12]Concerning the passage, Dewey addresses the doctrine of divine revelation and the role of the imagination in experience and art.
Experience occurs continually, as people are always involved in the process of living, but it is often interrupted and inchoate, with conflict and resistance.
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.
He agrees that art has a unique quality, but argues that this is based on its concentrating meaning found in the world.
Dewey notes that formalist art critic Roger Fry spoke of relations of lines and colors coming to be full of passionate meaning within the artist.
The lines and colors of the painter's work crystallize into a specific harmony or rhythm which is a function also of the scene in its interaction with the beholder.
The artist first brings meaning and value from earlier experience to her observation giving the object its expressiveness.
By contrast, a non-art drawing that simply suggests emotions through arrangements of lines and colors is similar to a signboard that indicates but does not contain meaning: it is only enjoyed because of what they remind people of.
He states that “there can be no distinction drawn, save in reflection, between form and substance.” For Dewey, substance is different from subject.
He states: “There is rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, architecture and music exist.” Consequently, it makes sense for someone to see aesthetically according to Dewey.
This is merely an extreme case of contrasting aesthetic values based on different organizations of energy.
“An experience becomes mystical in the degree which the sense, the feeling, of the unlimited envelope becomes intense – as it may do in the experience of an art object.” Though this mystical quality may not be a common substance of all art objects, the sense of wholeness within the object and its relation to a background are.
Non-aesthetic journeying is undertaken merely to arrive at the destination; any steps to shorten the trip are gladly taken.
Dewey devotes most of the remainder of the chapter to a discussion of these qualities in different art works and disciplines.
He claims that there must be common substance in the arts “because there are general conditions without which an experience is not possible.” Ultimately, then, it is the person experiencing the artwork who must distinguish and appreciate these common qualities, for “the intelligibility of a work of art depends upon the presence to the meaning that renders individuality of parts and their relationship in the whole directly present to the eye and ear trained in perception.” Dewey argues that the concept of "art" can only become a noun when it has obtained a quality of both doing and being done.
In contrast, Dewey argues that classification such as this fails when it is used as a means to an end as opposed to a tool or framework.