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).
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.'
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.