Art as Experience
Based on John Dewey’s lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.
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What Hacker News says
- If this kind of thing interests you, you might also like John Dewey's Art as Experience. It is among Paul Rand's favorite books, but be warned it is quite dense!
- I'm sure you'll do some thinking on the philosophy of art front. To name a few recommendations: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) and Dewey's Art as Experience (1934).
> Art [as a creation] does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation [or nature, in a Spinozian meaning, which is but an eternal activity of creation], sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature. (John Berger, "The White Bird")
- The classics, the most famous books of the last few thousand years, are a good bet. They've appealed to many generations. You have to read them to find out which ones speak to you.
For me, I'm constantly rereading the essays and non-fiction/philosophical writings of Hazlitt, Emerson, Chesterton, Stevenson, Santayana, William James, Collingwood. For 20+ years so far. Others, like Nietzsche, Wilde, Hilary Putnam, Dewey, I don't read so constantly but I've read some/most of their books over and over again. Wilde's Intentions, Putnam's Realism with a Human Face, Dewey's Art as Experience, for example, and almost everything of Nietzsche's, e.g. Human, All Too Human or Daybreak, I find endlessly rereadable. Chesterton, Nietzsche and Wilde are very funny too.
- Lakoff and Johnson followed up with Philosophy in the Flesh, applying their conceptual metaphor analysis to philosophies and philosophers. One of the most enlightening philosophy books I've read - and I read mostly philosophy for many years - it felt like having my eyes opened. And the book that helped me in understanding art and music far more than any other, Dewey's Art as Experience, I picked up because of good things they say about Dewey in the first pages of Philosophy in the Flesh! I'm a musician and artist, so I'm extremely grateful for that lead.
- Also Richard Rorty. I seem to never agree with anything he says—he always goes too far—but have all his books and find him very stimulating. Hilary Putnam talks in his books about their disagreements, and Putnam always seems to take the more sensible side. Putnam is a very clear and stimulating writer—his Realism with a Human Face is perhaps his best and a good place to start, filled with remarkably good essays.
p.s. Dewey's Art as Experience changed my life. I'm a musician/artist and philosophy student, and it solved all my problems concerning art, which each further book of analytic philosophy of art had only multiplied.
- John Dewey - Art As Experience
I'm a jazz musician & artist who also studied philosophy a lot for a long time. Aged about 30 I was reading a lot of philosophy books about art, and about philosophy of music, both the classics and the latest books. Trying to understand how on earth Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony could have the effect on me that it did. But it seemed each new book just split the subject into finer pieces, about which they knew less and less. Plus a lot of recent philosophy of music books seemed...stupid, blind, written by people unqualified to write them. Anyway, Lakoff & Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh mention John Dewey as someone who never fell victim to the Subjectivist/Objectivist split.. So I picked up Art as Experience where it had been on my shelf for years, unappreciated. And..instantly all my problems with understanding music were solved. He talks a lot about things in everyday life—someone poking a fire, or (my favourite) a job interview!—showing how the energies, tensions, patterns are the same as those in art. Maybe sounds obvious, but the philosophy books I'd been reading got further and further from life. So, I stopped reading about philosophy of art. I'm not saying I suddenly understood everything about how art does what it does, but it was no longer a confusing, troubling problem. It just seemed natural. (Dewey doesn't have the most exciting prose style, but what he says more than compensates for that.)
Emerson - Essays
(My first book had Essays, first and second series, Representative Men, and some other stuff) It was hugely inspiring every day for many years, from when I was about 20. He writes precisely to be inspiring. He teaches you to be yourself. But also at first it was as though he'd had written about 10,000 things I'd experienced but thought were impossible to describe. If I don't read him so often now, his themes are part of me; usually it's to look up some lines I partly remember. I've probably spent more time with him than anyone.
Vonnegut - Sirens of Titan
I discovered it aged about 15. The first novel I really loved, that somehow spoke to me, that I could totally relate to. Very funny too. I read it over and over again on the school bus, a 40 minute trip, for 6 months or so. Some years I later enjoyed his Breakfast of Champions a lot too, but nothing was like Sirens. At 15 I had a telescope, was into Carl Sagan, wanted to be an astronomer, so I guess the space aspect appealed. p.s. I was later in a free jazz/rock band called The Ghosts of Saturn. Coincidentally, my brother was once in a rock band called CSI (Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum!)
