English Abstract In Art as Experience, John Dewey decried the estrangement of art from lived human experience, both by artificial conceptual walls and the physical walls that secluded art within museums. Instead he argued that making and enjoying art are crucial organic functions that sustain communities and integrate individuals within their environments. In the 1920’s Diego Rivera became one of the luminaries of the Mexican muralist movement by creating frescoes that were rooted in Mexican life, both in their subject matter (...) and public location. Rivera and the other artists working within the government cultural program guided by José Vasconcelos created murals that boldly expressed the new values of democracy, peaceful revolution, racial equality and cultural pride. This essay explores the deep resonance between Rivera’s most prominent murals from this period and Dewey’s argument that art is a refined and integral feature of human experience. In particular, this essay will examine the great extent to which these men independently came to the common understanding that for people to thrive and grow they need to create and experience art that grows out of and remains rooted in their culture. Without claiming that either thinker influenced the other, this essay argues that their works mutually inform and enrich each other. Both men sought to free art from the museum, but where Dewey urged us tear down the walls that separated art from lived experience, Rivera transformed walls themselves into murals that unified and educated the people of Mexico and restored their culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art as Occupations:Two Neglected Roots of John Dewey's AestheticsAuthors: Fabio Campeotto (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, CONICET, Univ. Nacional de La Rioja); Juan Manuel Saharrea (CONICET, Universidad Católica de Córdoba-Unidad Asociada al CONICET) and Claudio M. Viale (CONICET, Universidad Católica de Córdoba-Unidad Asociada al CONICET). Campeotto and Saharrea contributed similarly to the development of this work. Language edition: Rita Karina Plascencia, https://www.rkplasencia.com/. This article was made in (...) the frame of two research projects: "Pragmatismo y educación: Fundamentos teóricos y abordajes empíricos," financed by the Universidad Católica de Córdoba (2019–2023); and "Praxis, experimentalismo, aprendizaje y democracia: hacia una reevaluación de la filosofía de la educación contemporánea," PICT 2020 serie A 01539 financed by the Fondo para la Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (FONCyT). Both projects were under the direction of C. M. Viale.undoubtedly, art as experience1 is one of the most important texts by John Dewey, as well as his most systematic approach to aesthetics.2 This book usually appears in the literature as an almost mandatory reading for interpreters of classical pragmatism, and it is praised as an ineludible reference for those interested in aesthetics from a pragmatic point of view. However, this justified centrality tends to invisibilize two important veins of Dewey's thought: the vital role of his fragmentary or piecemeal approach to aesthetics, on one hand, and the relevance of his educational conceptions in relation to aesthetics, on the other.Going beyond the centrality of Art as Experience toward a comprehensive and contemporary view of Dewey's aesthetics entails looking upon three elements of his thought: Firstly, Dewey's works—some of them considered minor and some implicit or sporadic references in canonical texts—depicting the links between education and aesthetics in his philosophy as well as texts that belong to his fragmentary approach to aesthetics. Secondly, his systematic development of aesthetics, mainly in Art as Experience, where Dewey presents his conceptions at length. Thirdly, what we could call a re-evaluated aesthetics, which consists in a contemporary attempt to integrate diverse aspects of his philosophy, trying to overcome some weaknesses in his theoretical developments, especially regarding his dealing with the links between education and [End Page 1] aesthetics. It is necessary to remark that these links were neither adequately addressed by Dewey nor exhaustively examined by the literature, as far as we know. We hold that it is crucial to make them critically explicit, in order to get fruitful contemporary approaches not only to Dewey's aesthetics but also to his pedagogy and philosophy of education.Thus, the core question of this article is the following: How should the educational root of Dewey's aesthetics have worked? Or, more precisely, how should he have explicitly or meticulously conceived aesthetics in relation to his educational developments? We think that two neglected roots of Dewey's writings related to aesthetics can help us to re-evaluate it: what we call its fragmentary approach and Albert C. Barnes's role in it, on one hand, and a coherent articulation among occupation, art teaching, and the overcoming of the distinction between vocational and humanistic education, on the other.To carry out our task, we have divided this article into three parts. In the first (The Genesis of Dewey's Aesthetics: A Re-interpretation), we argue how to interpret the emergence of Dewey's aesthetics. In the second (Dewey and Education: Central Issues), we present the key aspects of this topic related to our purposes. In the third section (Two Neglected Roots of Dewey's Aesthetics), we develop our argument by describing how to recover these sources, and also by showing how Dewey's aesthetics could be critically re-evaluated or reconstructed from a contemporary viewpoint. Finally, we put forward a conclusion.The Genesis of Dewey's Aesthetics: A Re-interpretationIt is well-known that Dewey's aesthetics is usually equated with Art as Experience. This is part of the canonical interpretations that tend to conceive Dewey's philosophy in, using his term, grooves (LW 2:113). Democracy and Education... (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of the relationship between technology and art in human existence from a Deweyan perspective. The central idea is that Dewey’s aesthetics is a useful instrument for critically reflecting on that issue. Starting from the tenets of Dewey’s aesthetics, the discourse focuses on “imaginative recovery” and “inhabiting,” two key notions for interpreting and managing technology from an aesthetic perspective. The article seeks an answer to the question of whether new technology (particularly ai) is a useful tool (...) or not in art and, ultimately, for the fulfilment of human life. (shrink)

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’s Art as Experience. The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing does (...) within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life. (shrink)