J Dewey

Just started to read John Dewey’s Art as Experience. This is a book I should have read decades ago, but better late than never. It does not take many pages to understand that our respective view of art are close relatives. Museums, art exhibitions and other similar institutions have always put me in a state of bewilderment. Art is not about spectators meeting objects with a certain kind of techno-social status. Art is the action or process of creating and/or experiencing. Let’s take Da Vinci painting Mona Lisa as an example. What is Mona Lisa? It is a material design, made to reflect the person it mimics. The art-aspect belongs to the process when Leonardo created the image and when people like you and I view the design. For me, It’s more art to observe someone experiencing Mona Lisa, than viewing it myself as a spectator. When I view Mona Lisa and it intertwines with my own experience, it becomes art. Art is not something to be measured on the scale of good or bad. Art is experience.

We are living in a time period with great change. This might be somewhat cryptic, but I would say that philosophy as Philosophy, art as Art and even science as Science doesn’t exist anymore. The search for objective truth, obejctive beauty and objective knowlege is more or less done in vain and probably have more to do with the socio-economic sphere in out lives. The processes of philosophy, art and science is more important than ever, but they are not located beyond time and space.