Dewey, III: Having an Experience
An experience has a unity...a single quality. an experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality... the non-esthetic lies within two limits...loose succession...[and] arrest, constriction..the enemies of the esthetic are...the humdrum, slackness...submission to convention..... emotions are qualities...of a complex experience that moves and changes. Every experience...is the interaction between a live creature and some aspect of the world in which he lives.... an experience has pattern and structure...it consists of [doing and undergoing] in relationship. Experiences are also cut short from maturing by excess of receptivity...nothing takes root in mind when there is no balance between doing and receiving...To apprehend such relations is to think.... the esthetic is..the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience... "artistic" refers primarily to the act of production and "esthetic" to that of perception and enjoyment...the distintion cannot be pressed so far as to become a separation.... Craftsmanship must be "loving"; it must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised. To be truly artistic, a work must be... framed for enjoyed receptive perception.... there is an element of passion in all esthetic perception. Yet when we are overwhelmed by passion...the experience is definitely un-esthetic...the experience lacks elements of balance and proportion.... the real work of an artist is to build up an experience that is coherent in perception which moving with constant change in its development. Recognition is perception arrested before it has a chance to develop freely...In recognition we fall back, as upon a stereotype, upon some previously formed scheme...Recognition is too easy to arouse vivid consciousness. There is not enough resistance between new and old to secure consciousness of the experience...The esthetic...involves surrender....Perception is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive... to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations...an act of abstraction ..is extraction of what is significant. The emotional phase binds parts together into a single whole; "intellectual" simply names the fact that the experience has meaning; "practical"indicates that the organism is interacting with events and objects which surround it.

VI: Substance and Form
Language exists only when it is listened to as well as spoken. The hearer is an indispensable partner....All language...involves what is said and how it is said, or substance and form. Is "beauty" another name for form descending from without, as a transcendent essence, upon material, or is it a name for the esthetic quality that appears whenever material is formed in a way that renders it adequately expressive? Is form...something that uniquely marks off as esthetic...a certain realm of objects, or is it the abstract name for what emerges whenever an experience attains complete development? [cf. Plato vs. Aristotle, etc.] A new poem is created by every one who reads poetically...every individual brings with him...a way of seeing and feeling that in its interaction with old material creates something new, something previously not existing....A work of art...is actually...a work of art only when it lives in some individualized experience...it is recreated every time it is estheticlaly experienced...it is absurd to ask what an artist "really" meant by his product... works that fail to become new are those which are "dated"....a way of envisaging...matter so that it...becomes material for the construction of adequate experience....there can be no distinction drawn...between form and substance....the act itself is exactly what it is because of how it is done... subject-matter is all the experiences a reader brings with him.... artists strive to escape from the general tendency to link an object of art with some scene or course of events that listeners and spectators recognize from their prior experience...in such treatment the picture...ceases to be a picture and becomes an inventory or document....the common tendency to treat a work of art as a mere reminder of something....the painting is used a a spring board for arriving at sentiments that are...agreeable....form is the rational...element...set over against "matter,"...the irrational, the inherently chaotic and fluctuating, stuff upon which form was impressed...This metaphysical distinction...still affects the esthetic philosphy...the only distinction important is...that between matter inadequately formed and material completely and coherently formed...objects take on esthetic form...when the material is so arranged and adapted that it serves immediately the enrichment of the immediate experience of the one whose attentive perception is directed to it.... "design"...signifies purpose and it signifies arrangement. The characteristic of artistic design is in the intimacy of the relations that hold the parts together....

Barnes:
form is the synthesis or fusion of all plastic means...pattern...is merely the skeleton... There are...in our minds in solution a vast number of emotional attitudes, feelings ready to be reexcited when the proper stimulus arrives...this residue of experience..constitutes the artist's capital...his abilty to transfer these values from one field of experience to another....an esthetic necessity: the immediacy of esthetic experience...what is not immediate is not esthetic....ideas exercise a mediating function...We cannot grasp any idea..until we have felt and sensed it....Beauty...is properly an emotional term....In the presence of a...picture that lays hold of us with immediate poignancy, we are moved to ...exclaim "how beautiful." The ejaculating is a just tribute to the capacity of the object to arouse admiration....Beauty is at the furthest remove from an analytic term, and hence from...theory as a means of explantiaon or classification....Unfortunately, it has been hardened into a peculair object.... it is surely better to deal with the experience itslef and show whence and how the quality proceeds...beauty is the response to that which to reflection is the consummated movement of matter integrated through its inner relationship....what is form in one context is matter in another.....the esthetic value...lies in the integration of...[sense and thought]....

application of scientific method... appreciation is made difficult by unconscious habits and preconceptions... We ask of a work of art that it reveal to us the qualities in objects and sitautions which are significant, which have the power to move us esthetically. The artist must open our eyes to what unaided we could not see... common popular misconception, a painter is often expected to tell as story...a literary or moral value is mistaken for a plastic value...to the hostile academician...the mere fact of novelty...is an irritation....pride...inertia... seeing is something which must be learned, and not something which we all do as naturaly as we breathe....the psychology of perception....impressions reach us from the external world......by our sense organs....Such impressions, however, convey nothing to us unless we can interpret them....possible only to one who can bring the residue or record of past experience to bear... to use our senses is...an active process, not a mere registration of impressions.... We perceive only what we have learned to look for

II. The Roots of Art

behind preferences we cannot go....Reason...can never prove anything good which does not leads..to some experience valued for its own sake....in it an instinctive prompting finds fulfillment....The enjoyment of art is...desirable for their own sake....emotionalist...sentimentalist.... Rationality...consists in control of emotion by identification of the self with the situation as it objetively exists.... "Interest" lies in concern...with objective things, and concer which is permanent....the artist...selects aspects for emphasis and gives significant order...But it is appeal to feeling that confers significance....Things are important...by virtue of their relation to feeling or interest...

III. Expression and Decoration

The artist...ability to make what he sees a public object..act of insight into the objective world by virtue of which it assumes form and order.... revelation of significance..the perception of something real. It aims at extracting the essential, but the essential itself varies... direct impact...on the senses is very important...qualities as are immediately apprehended... decoration and expression are combined... art as a way of seeing... immediately agreeable exercise of our powers of perception... We see only by utilizing the vision of others...embodied in the traditions....Each represents a systematic way of envisaging the world....either as a storehouse of instruments for the resourceful, or as a crutch for the crippled...the moment it ceases to suggest and begins to legislate, academicism sets in. An artist...is able to select from the work of his predecessors...modifying...recombining....

IV. The Esthetic Values of Painting

human values and plastic values... Confusion of values arises only when the spectator is moved...by what he does not show him--the historical event...can produce nothing but distraction....form is that which gives to anything...its distinctive character...form gives the essence of the thing...no single form represents the thing in concrete fulness...the depth and pwoer of a mind ...is measured by the variety and subtlety of the forms accessible to it....form is the plan of organization by which the details...are brought into relation...greater the formal unification...the better the painting.... Academic critics necessarily fail to estimate justly the work of any artist, because its fixed standards are inapplicable to a world which is in a state of flux....Insofar as the spectator...must depend upon the resources of his own information to read the qualities of the subject-matter...the effect is illegitimate...we do not need to know the story to enjoy the music.... There are people who constantly desrie experiences as different as possible from those with which they are familiar, wo are chiefly concerned to add to the sum of their sensations....in contrast, people who prefer to discriminate between those experiences they already have had and thus to classify, order ,and penetrate deeply into a relatively small segment of life [lumpers and splitters?] ...what is matter in relation to more generalized form, is form with relation to other matter....in every work of great art a pervasive and subtle quality which defies analysis and for the recognition of which no rules are adequate..."quality"[ZAMM!] ...ultimate dependence of esthetic appreciation upon something which must be felt, and cannot simply be abstractly formulated...proof of the affinity between art and instinct....

V. Art and Mysticism

a sense of union with something not ourselves...the barriers which ordinarily shut in our independent existence apprear to dissolve...sense of union with our environment..encourages and reenforces our wishes....the world of art..has been made by human beings for the direct satisfaction of their wishes. It is the real world stripped of what is meaningless....deeper harmonies, frustrated by our life in a world so indifferent to our feelings, that art sets in vibrations. Through the expressive form...the imperfect expressiveness or responsiveness of material objects is supplemented and heightened....