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Camden Philosophical Society: “Art as Experience”
Tuesday, July 21 @ 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm
The July 21st session will, as usual, be a hybrid gathering from 3:30-5:30 pm EDT on the third Tuesday of the month. All are welcome to participate, in-person at the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library or by Zoom. That goes for visitors, as well as year-rounders in Maine, and friends of the society wherever you may be.
If you wish to join via Zoom, please email sewright772@gmail.com. You will receive a Zoom invitation on the day of the meeting. Click on the “Join Zoom Meeting” link in that invitation at the time of the event.
On July 21, the Camden Philosophical Society will continue their exploration of Dewey’s ideas as they relate to art. Greg Fahy will present a brief introduction to Art as Experience. Here Dewey
provides us with an account of art that is entirely continuous with his account of experience that we read about last month.
Please read all of chapter 1 “The Live Creature” (pages 3-19) and also the first few pages of chapter 3 “Having an Experience” (p. 35 to the top of p. 41). All pages are within the pdf text. Art as Experience can be found here.
The work of art is not a museum piece or a score of music, but instead is what is done in and to the experiences of living creatures. Aesthetic experience is a particular quality of experience. Most experience, Dewey concedes, is not particularly aesthetic, but when we say that we have had an experience, that indicates a kind of wholeness and integration of the different elements of experience that can make an experience aesthetic.
Too often, Dewey argues, art is separated from life and put on a pedestal (literally), entirely separate from the experiences of the people and cultures that created that art. In many cases, we struggle to bring the piece of art in the museum back to the aesthetic experiences of human beings. We can spend some time on Dewey’s critique of museums if we wish. But the larger concern for Dewey are the divisions that our culture creates between the artist and the viewer as well as between ordinary experience and aesthetic experience. We might explore what it might mean to create more aesthetic experience within our everyday lives.