Name: Art as Experience
ISBN: 9780399531972

John Dewey

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.

Art as Experience

Nelson Zagalo

Masterpiece. Thanks John Dewey for writing this book, even more because it was written in 1934.

This should be obligatory read for anyone studying/researching Art Communication. Before the domain of Communication Sciences even existed, before Emotion Studies were seriously accepted by the academy, Dewey has written a profound and dense work on the subject of Art Experience. It was done from a philosophical approach, however Dewey, clearly influence by his Pragmatics companion, William James, the father of Functional Psychology, does a magnificent cognitive analysis of the relation between the Art Work and the Subject Receptor. Dewey never refrains himself to talk about emotion, to go in depth in the analysis of the experiential human construct.

To fully understand how this book came to exist, it's necessary to go back and research Pragmatism, a movement founded by Dewey, James and Peirce.

The book is dense, it takes time to read, but it rewards yo, the more you invest in it.