Art as Experience

Dewey treats art as a language composed of many idioms, with each medium uniquely communicating what cannot be conveyed in another. He stresses that art requires both speaker and listener: He says the artist, the product, and the audience form a triadic relationship. Even in solitude, the artist must act as their own audience, testing whether the work “speaks.” This relationship frames the larger question of how form and substance interact, as Dewey investigates whether materials are already complete before being given form, or if they become meaningful only through artistic creation.

Dewey rejects the dualism that separates matter and form. If art were merely self-expression, then substance and form would fall apart. However, true art assimilates shared materials and reissues them in distinctive, individual ways that the audience can also reconstruct in experience. Thus, a work of art becomes universal by its ability to inspire new, personal realizations across time and culture. Dewey says that the Parthenon, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner cannot be reduced to their “subjects;” their substance lies in what the work achieves.