 Okay, welcome back to Great Texts. We're discussing John Dewey's art as experience, chapter 10, the varied substance of the arts. You'll recall last week we discussed chapter nine, and that concerned the common substance of the arts. And obviously, this chapter concerns the variations rather than the commonalities between different artworks and art forms. Now this chapter, I'm sure you've noticed, is particularly negative in its approach. Dewey discusses various ways of classifying the variety of different types of art for the most part in order to criticize those classification schemes. That's not altogether surprising, given what we already know, that Dewey's primary emphasis is on qualitative wholeness and uniqueness of every work of art, that he would have concerns about these classificatory schemes. So no huge surprise there. Now as we will see, Dewey does explain what he thinks the ground of variation in the substance of the arts is, and it does connect to one broad distinction between types of art that he is less critical of, although he doesn't see it as a real system of classification in the rigid sense. So now in this chapter, Dewey gives significant space to a discussion of various media of fine arts, such as painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature, and specifically the characteristics of them and the differences between them. So Dewey's not allergic to talking about different types of art. However, he does have some trouble with the classificatory schemes that are typically used. Now the Dewey starts off the chapter telling us this, that art is a quality of doing and of what is done. We use the word art as what you might call a substantive noun as a word that refers to a thing, right? But Dewey tells us art is really more of an adjective and that makes sense, right, based on other aspects of Dewey's theory. When we call something art, whether we're talking about a painting or song or someone skillfully putting up drywall, we're saying that what is done in the activities of making and of perceiving has an artful or artistic or aesthetic quality to it, right? So Dewey tells us that art is adjectival, right? It's really, we ought to think of it in the adjective sense. Dewey reminds us yet again that the product of art, the temple, painting, statue, poem, whatever, is not the work of art, right? And the work of art, he says, and this is a direct quote, takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties. Okay, so just reminding us of things he said. Several times before. And it's because of this, right? This, that art is a quality of acts of making and doing and perceiving and not a type of product that Dewey thinks it doesn't lend itself particularly well to division and classification of any rigid sort. Now, on the other hand, it's not surprising that theorists of art have focused so much on classification. As Dewey tells us, it's in the nature of thinking and theorizing, not just to discriminate, but to classify, to put things into boxes. But typically, these classifications serve some practical purposes well while failing to exhaustively and accurately capture all of experience, right? So these classifications inevitably are crude or fall apart with respect to other purposes, other aspects of the situation. Now let's look at a long paragraph where Dewey describes his problem with rigid classifications. He says rigid classifications are inept if they are taken seriously because they distract attention from that which is aesthetically basic. The qualitatively unique and integral character of experience as an art product. And again, nothing surprising here. The qualitative uniqueness and unity of the art product is something he's emphasized all along. But he says, for a student of aesthetic theory, they are also misleading. There are two important points of intellectual understanding in which they are confusing. These are the rigid classifications again. Rigid classifications inevitably neglect transitional and connecting links. And in consequence, they put insuperable obstacles in the way of an intelligent following of the historical development of any art. Here, Dewey seems to be concerned, and he quotes William James on this, with how arts merge and vary and escape tight classification. And also how historically art forms can kind of move from one category to another. We'll talk about an example of that in a second. So Dewey considers various classification schemes and explains what they get wrong, right? So the first scheme is to split up different types of art according to the different sense organs they speak to. Visual arts to the eye, music to the ear, et cetera. But as Dewey points out, all sense organs are involved in every experience. There's no specific limitation. You don't stop hearing when you view a painting. And some media switch emphasis, right? So poetry is an example of a medium of art which begins as an art of the ear, as spoken or even sung, but over time has sort of shifted through the use of print into a medium of the eye, an art form of the eye. And to the point of concrete poetry, which he references, which is not even legible without looking at it as such. He discusses the classification of art in terms of spatial art versus temporal art covered in the previous chapter. And as he told us there, this sort of misses the temporal quality of spatial arts and vice versa and confuses the physical product of art with the work of art. He also looks at just classifications according to whether the art is representative, like a painting depicting a person or a landscape versus non-representative, where the examples maybe are architecture or music. But Dewey, as we've seen before, Dewey has a problem with this way of thinking about representation and art. If by representative you mean expressive, then Dewey tells us all art is representative, music and architecture too. If what representative means is that it stands for in some sort of symbolic relationship or it's a copy of, right, then no art is representative, not in its particular artistic substance. Lastly, well, not exactly lastly, but another classification scheme he considers is in terms of aesthetic effects, whether it has a poetic or comic or tragic effect. And although this set of distinctions gets at something that's interesting to talk about, Dewey tells us here too that actual experience of such qualities is individual. It varies, it shifts, it merges, it depends on the particular context of a viewing of a work of art. Boxing such effects, such qualities into category schemes, Dewey tells us actually sort of sets up criteria that work to restrict creativity and hurt the arts. So here Dewey gives us a kind of general critique of all category schemes, again emphasizing the kinds of examples that escape the categorization. So, quote, moreover, as soon as lines have been drawn, the theorists who institute them find it necessary to make exceptions and introduce transitional forms and even to say that some arts are mixed, dancing, for example, being both spatial and temporal. Since it is the nature of any art object to be itself single and unified, the notion of a mixed art may be safely regarded as a reductio at absurdum of the whole rigid classificatory business. This relates actually to a discussion in class last time where we worried about what do we seem to be using the since organ-based scheme of classifying. And so we worried about dance or say theater or film. But here I think Dewey's clarifying that that's not really his view, that he doesn't think the since organ classification really works. Final scheme of classification, what Dewey considers is what he calls the automatic versus the shaping art. So the automatic arts being those that one can produce just using one's body, right? That might be singing, it could be dancing, it could be body modification, right? Tattooing or piercing, various other things of that sort. Versus the shaping arts, which take some external material and mold it, shape it, change it. So here you might think of a variety of things including architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, right? Because this is a broad distinction of different types of media relating pretty directly to our embodiment, Dewey gives this somewhat more credence than a lot of the other ways of classifying art. Although he wouldn't regard it as a major classificatory scheme because it really, he thinks that it's a spectrum, not a dichotomy. That is when we go from unaccompanied singing to music that involves both singing and instruments, right? If we think about the role of the body in various shaping arts, right? We start to see that there are various so-called middle cases and Dewey thinks these aren't a challenge to this sort of distinction as long as you don't really see it as a classificatory scheme with rigid boundaries. And any attempt to turn it into a hierarchy is absurd on Dewey's view, right? And he points out different historical moments in which the automatic arts were seen as higher arts than the shaping arts and in contemporary contexts, maybe the shaping arts are considered more fine than the automatic arts, but he thinks these hierarchies are not defensible and you might say stupid, right? Similar situation with the other classificatory schemes, often they are connected with some hierarchy of better or worse art that Dewey thinks is just untenable. Nevertheless, Dewey does not wanna make all art one undifferentiated mess, right? And he has some interesting things to say about different types of art. So he talks about different types of art. Here's how he splits the difference. Quote, such words as poetic, architectural, dramatic, sculptural, pictorial, literary designate tendencies that belong in some degree to every art because they qualify any complete experience. While, however, a particular medium is best adapted to making that strain emphatic. When I use the name of arts as nouns and what follows, poetry, sculpture, et cetera, I have in mind a range of objects that express a certain quality emphatically, but not exclusively, right? So from here, Dewey explores various aspects of different kinds of arts understood as tendencies rather than as absolute differences. You know, he asks us to think about how does sculpture differ from architecture? What makes literature different from other arts, et cetera? We may discuss the specific of those further in class. I'm not gonna, I'm not going to go into detail summarizing them here. So I'd like to end with this quote from the penultimate page of the chapter where Dewey again reminds us of the importance of medium. Every medium has its own power, active and passive, outgoing and receptive, and that the basis for distinguishing the different traits of the arts is their exploitation of the energy that is characteristic of the material used as a medium. Most of what is written about the different arts as different seems to me to be said from the inside, by which I mean it takes the medium as an existing fact without asking why and how it is what it is. But in fact here, Dewey thinks that what is possible for any work of art depends pretty heavily on what the medium is, right? What medium you're working with and its sort of, its capacities. So that's really all I have for today. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the various forums. Our next chapter, chapter 11, concerns what Dewey calls the human contribution. Mostly deals with what we would call the psychology of art. So that's what you have to look forward to for next time. But before then, I'll see you in class or I'll catch your contributions on the discussion board or elsewhere. Have a good day.