Philosophy
Dewey places art within the rhythms of perception, action and ordinary experience rather than isolating it inside museums.
Refined art is a heightened and concentrated form of ordinary doing and undergoing, not a separate kind of thing. To understand art you should start with everyday scenes and events, and only then work up to the concert hall and the gallery.
Experience is what builds up from a living body's continuous, cumulative give-and-take with its surroundings. The author argues that aesthetic theory has no other foundation. Inherited bodily equipment gives ideas their means of action, and conscious thought adds the power to select and rearrange, which is where deliberate art comes from.
Once art was declared a separate field and theories called it lofty and unworldly, a gap opened between fine art and ordinary experience. The arts with the most life for ordinary people, such as films, popular music and comics, stopped being seen as art at all. Many people would even be put off if told their pastimes please them partly for aesthetic reasons.
Art used to be built into religion and communal life, and its pleasure strengthened worship, ritual and storytelling instead of standing apart. Old rites and tales lasted despite their practical failures because they made living feel more vivid. The same delight in a good story still drives popular myths today.
Society is uncivil because people are split into groups that do not communicate: sects, races, nations, classes and cliques. The author holds that works of art are the most intimate and powerful way to let people share in the arts of living across those lines. On this view, a free creative culture comes before political freedom rather than following from it.
An object counts as art only to the degree that it becomes an experience for a person who meets it. Even a temple everyone calls a masterpiece has no aesthetic standing until someone takes it in. The art lies in what happens between the viewer and the material, not in the thing alone.
Most of life is scattered, but sometimes an activity runs through to a satisfying close: a problem solved, a game played out, a conversation brought round. Each part flows into the next and the whole ends in fulfillment rather than simply stopping. This rounded shape is the seed of the aesthetic.
The finished works a theory of art must explain end up getting in its way. Their prestige makes people study the objects themselves and forget the human experience that made them and that they produce. Explaining art means looking past the revered object to that experience.
The artistic side of a work is the doing and making, and the aesthetic side is the perceiving and enjoying. A product is art only when the two meet. So the maker works while perceiving, and a viewer who takes the work in actively retraces something of the making.
Simply pouring out feeling does not count as artistic expression. Expression comes from long stretches of activity and reflection by people deeply absorbed in observing experience. The emotion has to be worked through a material, not just released.