Art as Experience

Chapter 12 begins with the claim that all aesthetic experience is imaginative. Conscious perception requires imagination, since the present moment is always interpreted through meanings drawn from past experience. In art, imagination fuses old and new into a transformed whole, so that works embody broader values than the immediate here and now. Unlike machines, which use imagination only in service of practical ends, works of art operate imaginatively—they concentrate, enlarge, and reorganize lived experience into expressive form.

Dewey critiques theories that reduce art to dream or make-believe. He says that while reverie and illusion play a role in artistic conception, they lack the purposeful ordering of materials that transforms fleeting images into public objects. The “play theory” comes closer by recognizing the importance of activity, but it fails when it treats art as mere surplus energy or diversion. For Dewey, play matures into work when activity is directed toward a meaningful objective result.

He then examines the historical “representative theory,” which descends from Aristotle and, later, Sir Joshua Reynolds.