John Dewey "Art as Experience." Chapter 3

I went foraging on John Dewey in order to go deeper into the philosophical pragmatic roots of the attitudes behind "genius as a collective enterprise."

"(John) Dewey sees process as the experimental adjustment of a living organism to its environment, and the reorganization of the environment by the living organism. For Hegel, Spirit comes in itself finally out of the social reality; and so too for Dewey the human spirit is not merely a biological but a socially achieved form of being. Experimentalism is also experientialism, and Dewey thus replaces the monistic cosmic self-development of Absolute Spirit by the pluralistic experience of a finite human being."

(...) "it can be seen why Dewey thinks of art as experience, and particularly as experience in its integrity, for in art, which develops out of the generic aesthetic aspect of experience, the essence is experience brought to consummation and fulfillment." ( Hofstadter & Kuhnz)

Dewey starts Chapter 3 of "Art as Experience" equating experience with the becoming (devenir) of life. People interact continuously with the surrounding environment and in this interaction resistance and conflict find their counterpart in emotions and ideas; forming conscious intent. Dewey contrast ordinary, irrelevant experiences with the kind of experience that runs its material course provoking satisfaction, such as a work being finished, a game being played, a meal being enjoyed and every other kind of rounded activity that is "close to a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency" (Dewey 37).

Life is equated to idiomatic speech, having a beginning and an end, similar to a story plot, with its introduction and movement, conflict and resolution towards an end. What Dewey has in mind is the kind of experience (or the experience of a kind) that we will always recall: a catastrophic event or a happy one, the happening that marks a before and an after. This he compares to the flow of a river. In contrast to an unmovable pond, the movement of water from one place to another goes in successive stages each of which has its own self-identity, while at the same time not losing its part in the continuum.

Experience, like the stream of the river, has its moments of pauses, slowness and accelerations, narrowness and wideness, depth and shallowness until it disappears in the sea of darkness. The same holds true for the work of art, in which " different acts, episodes, occurrences, melt and fuse into unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their own character as they do so" (Ibid 38).

"An experience has a unity that gives it a name (...) The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variations of its constituent parts " (Ibid 38). 

An experience of thinking draws us to a conclusion. The conclusion is arrived at by a constant of movement, like the waves of the sea, clashing among each other in a storm or continually rolling one after another in cooperation until they reach the shore, "Hence,an experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality. It differs from those experiences that are acknowledged to be esthetic, but only in its materials. The material of fine arts consists of qualities; that of experiences having intellectual conclusions are signs or symbols not having intrinsic qualities of their own, but standing for things that may in another experience be qualitative experienced. The difference is enormous. It is one reason why the strict intellectual art will never be popular as music is popular. Nevertheless, the experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possess internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement. This artistic structure may be immediately felt, In so far, it is esthetic. What is even more important is that not only is this quality a significant motive in undertaking intellectual inquiry and in keeping it honest, but that no intellectual activity is an integral event (is an experience), unless is rounded out with this quality. Without, thinking is inconclusive. In short, esthetic cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual experience since the later must bear an esthetic stamp to be itself complete" (Ibid 39-40).

Similarly, in the practical realm, activities that require exercise of skills but doesn't have a sense of conscious purpose and fulfillment are different from those in which meaning is "conserved and accumulated toward and end that is felt as accomplishment of a process" ( Ibid 40). To provide an example, Dewey mentions the activity of politicians such as Cesar and Napoleon (add Fidel Castro), who have an interest not merely in efficiency but in the outcome of a process. " The experience may be one that is harmful to the world and its consummation undesirable, but it has esthetic quality' (Ibid 40).

Concerning moral actions, we should distinguishes those that are performed grudgingly, as an obligation, from those that are integral acts rolling towards their own fulfillment, thus endowed with esthetic quality.

An-esthetic experiences lies between the pole of lose succession with no particularly starting and ending points, and  the pole of constriction, " proceeding from parts having only a mechanical  connection with one another" (Ibid 41).

" (...) Every integral experience moves towards a close, an ending (...) This closure of a circuit of energy is the opposite of arrest, of stasis. Maturation and fixation are polar opposites. Struggle and conflict may be themselves enjoyed" (Ibid 42).

" (...) emotions are attached to events and objects in their movement. They are not, save in pathological instances, private" (Ibid 43).

The jump of fright becomes emotional  fear when there is a continuity, a constant in time and space, when is found or believed that there is an object to scape from.

 Dewey goes on to give account of potential esthetic experiences such as connecting distant objects and events across physical distances; or having a job interview.

Then Dewey goes on to say, "Because of perception of relationship of what is done and what is undergone constitutes the work of intelligence, and because the artist is controlled in the process of his work  by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is going to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific enquirer is absurd. A painter must consciously endure the effect of his very brushstroke or he will not be aware of what he is doing and where his work is going. Moreover, he has to see each particular connection of doing and undergoing in relation to the whole that he desires to produce. To apprehend such relations is to think, and is one of the most exacting modes of thought. The difference between the pictures of different painters is due quite as much to differences of capacity to carry on this thought  as it is to differences of sensitivity to bare color and to differences in dexterity of execution. As respect the basic quality of pictures, difference depends, indeed, more upon the quality of intelligence brought to bear upon perception of relations than upon anything else -though of course, intelligence cannot be separated from direct sensitivity and is connected, though in a more external matter, with skill" (Ibid 47).

"Indeed, since words are easily manipulated in mechanical ways, the production of a work of genuine art demands more intelligence than does most of the so called thinking that goes on among those who pride themselves as being 'intellectuals'" (Ibid 47).

Dewey's credo: (...) the esthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or transcendent ideality, but that it is the clarified ans intensified development of traits that belongs to every normal complete experience" (Ibid 48).

Then Dewey goes on to mark what makes different "artistic" from "esthetic". Art is centered on doing or making while esthetic is about perception and enjoyment, the standpoint of the consumer as different from that of the producer.

However an experience of doing and undergoing cannot be pressed so much as to separate art from esthetic, they both occur at the same time in the artist creating her work. "To be truly artistic, a work must be also esthetic -that is, framed for enjoyed receptive perception" (Ibid 49).

"The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production (...) the artist embodies in himself the qualities of the perceiver while works' (Ibid 50).

After this, Dewey compares the tasting of the food by an Epicurean as different from that of a person who only 'likes' food. Then Dewey goes on to include tasting, hearing and seeing as esthetic "when relation to a distinct manner of activity qualifies what is perceived" (Ibid 51).

"There is an element of passion in esthetic perception. Yet when we are overwhelmed by passion, as in extreme rage, fear, jealousy, the experience is definitely non-esthetic. There is no relation felt to the qualities of the activity that has generated the passion. Consequently, the material of the experience lacks elements of balance and proportion. For these can be present only when, as in the conduct that has grace or dignity, the act is controlled by an exquisite sense of relations which the acts sustains -its fitness to the occasion and to the situation " (Ibid 51).

"In as far as the development of an experience is controlled through reference to these immediately felt relations of order and fulfillment, that experience becomes dominantly esthetic in nature. The urge to action becomes an urge to that kind of action which will result in an object satisfying in direct perception" (Ibid 52).

"The doing may be energetic, and the undergoing may be acute and intense. But unless they are related to each other to form a whole in perception, the thing done is not fully esthetic. The making for example may be a display of technical virtuosity, and the undergoing a gush of sentiment or a revery. If the artist does not perfect a new vision in the process of doing, he acts mechanically and repeats some old model fixed like a blueprint in his mind. An incredible amount of observation and of the kind of intelligence that is exercised in perception of qualitative relations characterizes creative work in art. The relations must be noted not only with respect to one another, two by two, but in connection with the whole under construction; they are exercised in imagination as well as in observation. irrelevances arise that are tempting distractions, digressions suggest themselves in the guise of enrichments. There are occasions when the grasp of the dominant idea grows faint, and then the artist is moved unconsciously to fill until his thought grows strong again. The real work of an artist is to build up an experience that is coherent in perception while moving with constant change in its development" (Ibid 52-53).

Going back to the beginning of this paper, my purpose foraging Dewey was to find the philosophical pragmatic foundation of the kind of creative activity exemplified in the American first half 20th Century animation studios. I find useful Dewey's conception of a living organism experimenting with the environment in an experience of adaption, changing it in the process. I cannot disagree with the idea of the gifted artist who "in comparison with his fellows, is one who is not only especially gifted in powers of execution but in unusual sensitivity to the quality of things" (Dewey 51). But I do find the super gifted individual artist as an insufficient productive and perceptive model in the conditions of today.

The conditions of today requires the model of an artist capable of catching up with the intensified 21st century environment of global competition. Anyone who is familiar to academy knows of the unlimited number of talented, gifted and productive young individuals that come out of art school every other semester. These emerging artists need to compete among each other for the few galleries that can provide them with a career and access  to collectors. In order to succeed in this high voltage environment, production must be multiplied to levels that even a productive genius such as Picasso would find hard to keep up with. The artist needs to multiply himself and his work manifold. Strategies need to be put in place; such as creating different personas each of which produces different directions of work, and delegating work on assistants. I'm sure you have already noticed that most of the artists that are globally successful use these kind of practices in their own activity; whether creating and producing several lines of objects  or relaying on a team of creative idea and manufacturer people.

The network economies of the Internet pave the way for new platforms of distribution and consumption of art. Auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's still control access to elite collectors and institutions capable of shedding millions on a single work of art. But the democratic utopian dream of making and providing art for the masses is a new territory beginning to be explored through the capabilities of the Internet and globalization processes. What could be described as the main feature that differentiates an artist of the 21st Century from one of the 20th Century according with the organicist model provided by Dewey is that the artist of the 21st Century is interacting with a global environment that challenges with new conditions of communication, production and perception. In order to interact with the new environment new methods of production and distribution must be explored. Sure, some of these methods will fail and some will succeed, but the only way to know which ones will fail and which ones will succeed is by experimenting.


Work Cited:

Hofstadter, Albert & Kuhnz, Richard. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. U. of Chicago P. 1976. 

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. The Berkley Publishing Group. Perigee, 2005.