Art as Experience

Dewey's book on aesthetics, based on the William James Lectures he gave at Harvard in 1931. It begins by criticising the "museum" idea of art, which cuts works off from the everyday life that produced them, and sets out to recover the continuity between art and ordinary experience. Dewey's starting point is "the live creature" in constant interaction with its surroundings. In his best-known chapter, "Having an Experience", he distinguishes the scattered flow of daily life from an experience that runs its course to a fulfilment and has its own unity; such experiences are already aesthetic in quality. He then treats expression as the forming of raw impulse through a medium, discusses rhythm, form and substance and what the different arts share, and gives an account of criticism. The book closes by arguing that art is a form of communication central to a civilisation's life.

It offers an account of art rooted in everyday experience rather than in galleries or theory, and it still informs work on design, education and everyday aesthetics.