Art as Experience

I’ve been read­ing Art as ExperienceJohn Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton Balch & Co, 1934). a few pages at a time over the past year. I’ve need­ed to read it like this be­cause of how much is in every para­graph and how much it pulls at ideas from else­where. Here, I want to share some of themes that have come up through­out the book.

Every medi­um is unique. When you prac­tice us­ing a medi­um, you learn what choic­es an artist is forced to make when they use that medi­um to ex­press their ideas. You can more clear­ly see what as­pects of ex­pe­ri­ence an artist has cho­sen to ex­press. What ob­jects, char­ac­ter­is­tics, and re­la­tion­ships has the artist se­lect­ed and em­pha­sized? Those de­ci­sions work their way into ex­pres­sion differently with every medi­um.

For art is a se­lec­tion of what is significant, with re­jec­tion by the very same im­pulse of what is ir­rel­e­vant, and there­by the significant is com­pressed and intensified.

One com­mon writ­ing ex­er­cise is to read a piece of prose, hide it, then try to re­pro­duce it.The Art of Writing; Practising Plagiarism (Or Rather, Copywork).,Can copy­ing nov­els help me im­prove my writ­ing?,How to write the best sto­ry ever with one epic ex­er­cise. But not by sim­ply mem­o­riz­ing it word for word. The key to that ex­er­cise is to imag­ine a set of de­ci­sions be­hind the text. In do­ing this, you be­come more aware of what has been em­pha­sized, what has been ig­nored, what re­la­tion­ships were raised to promi­nence, and how the text was used to achieve this.

A sec­ond theme dis­tin­guish­es be­tween me­dia and mere means. Better artists can make their cho­sen medi­um one with the ex­pres­sion and not mere­ly a means.

con­ver­sa­tion, dra­ma, nov­el, and ar­chi­tec­tur­al con­struc­tion, if there is an or­dered ex­pe­ri­ence, reach a stage that at once records and sums up the val­ue of what pre­cedes, and evokes and proph­e­sies what is to come.

[n]ot all means are me­dia. There are two kinds of means. One kind is ex­ter­nal to that which is ac­com­plished; the oth­er kind is tak­en up into the con­se­quences pro­duced and re­mains im­ma­nent in them. There are ends which are mere­ly wel­come ces­sa­tions and there are ends that are fulfillments of what went be­fore. […] Sometimes we jour­ney to get some­where else be­cause we have busi­ness at the lat­ter point and would glad­ly, were it pos­si­ble, cut the trav­el­ling. At oth­er times we jour­ney for the de­light of mov­ing about and see­ing what we see. Means and end co­a­lesce. […] all the cas­es in which means and ends are ex­ter­nal to one an­oth­er are non-es­thet­ic. […] In all ranges of ex­pe­ri­ence, ex­ter­nal­i­ty of means defines the me­chan­i­cal. […] Means are, then, me­dia when they are not just prepara­to­ry or pre­lim­i­nary.

This also comes up in Thomas and TurnerFrancis-Noël Thomas & Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Princeton University Press, 2011).: how words can be used in a way that they be­come one with the ex­pres­sion. Prose be­comes art when the sen­tence and para­graph struc­tures, con­nec­tives, and word choic­es reflect not just the log­i­cal truth be­ing pre­sent­ed, but also the ex­pe­ri­ence, the feel­ing, that the au­thor is try­ing to share.

in [a] clas­sic sen­tence, the last sec­tion is the con­clu­sion of all that has gone be­fore it; the be­gin­ning of the sen­tence ex­ists for the end, and the sen­tence is con­struct­ed so that we can an­tic­i­pate ar­riv­ing at such a con­clu­sion.

A third theme, re­lat­ed to the pre­vi­ous one, is the sat­is­fac­tion that comes from bring­ing or­der to a medi­um, and the val­ue in do­ing that work.

The work takes place when a hu­man be­ing co­op­er­ates with the prod­uct so that the out­come is an ex­pe­ri­ence that is en­joyed be­cause of its lib­er­at­ing and or­dered prop­er­ties.