Thursday, March 3, 2011

Tolstoy vs. Dewey (Response to Johnathan Logan)

In a recent post, Johnathan wrote, "... it is fairly safe to assume that any given aesthetic experience cannot be considered fully without all the participants of that experience - that is: the subjects, the times, the places, the actions, the reactions, etc. It is in this way that art, for both creator and audience, is a continuation of their respective experiences." Looking to this quotation, I realize that what Dewey differentiates as an experience from experience in its ordinary form is dependent upon much more than the material, the creator, and the observer. Context as a continuation provide an opportunity for something to become an aesthetic experience. Using the example from class, driving a car down a highway might, for one person, be second nature--experience. Driving down the same highway, however, may very well constitute as an experience (and therefore aesthetic artistic) for another individual due to the content of a conversation they have with a friend sitting beside them in the passenger seat about, for example--the curve of the road or the foliage on the trees may trigger a childhood memory which makes the viewer appreciative of the scenery, and THIS may be considered an aesthetic experience. Does Dewey's extreme subjectivity in regard to art suggest that every experience and every object has the POTENTIAL to elicit aesthetic emotion?

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