Professor, I'm only two thirds through your video, but you've given me (already) a vocabulary and image of things that are so salient in my current experience. Your bringing forth of the meeting and intermingling of art and agent points me to vague traces of I and Thou, and your explanation of the distinction between expression and discharge enriches my understanding of a pattern I recognise when dealing with difficult emotions - suddenly I have words for what was formerly intuition.

Thank you!

NOTES:  11:10 ff nice quote and discussion of music as a transactional experience."Sounds come from outside body, but sound = "near, intimate;... we feel the clash of vibrations throughout our whole body".... Sounds have the power of direct emotional expression."  The art is an experience of the music/painting et al. , not something "external" (an object for a subject). See his transactionalism in Knowing and the known.
20:10 on discharge (of emotion ) vs. Expression of it.  Someone spontaneously acting angrily may appear as an expression to an outsider, but crucially, the agent's intent was not to elicit or evoke a sense of anger in onlookers, they were rather "discharging" their feeling simply because they were undergoing it. Expression in aesthetic experience is motivated by the intention of eliciting in others AN experience  (i.e. a unified  whole) in which an emotion, or indeed more than one emotion, predominates the quality of that experience (e.g. reverence and awe, or dread and anxiety, or  contentment and ease, etc.) 21:30 on unity of expeience and consummatory exp.  22:40 emotions are not discrete and self-contained, but "when significant " they are "qualities that move and change" in ways similar to the unfolding of a drama.  The unique quality and feeling of an experience (a salient memory, the experience of listening to a song or movement of a symphony etc.) is ineffable, and emotional labels like "happy" or "sad" or "joyous" etc.,  are not capable of picking out or evoking or communicating the feeling of AN experience with all its interrelated moving parts which hang together dramatically, emotionally. These are like episodes that stand apart from the ordinary flux of experience. And just saying "that song/painting etc. is "sad" or "scary" or whatever does very little to communicate or evoke the experience in someone who does not undergo the experience (by listening to the song, say, which then communicates or evokes this complex of qualities/emotions that have a unified overall quality). Note the art HAPPENS  in the interaction/transaction between the person and the work of art. They come together in and AS aesthetic experience. Art isn't "out there" nor is aesthetic experience  "in here/in my head/subjective" -- Rather the locus of the work of art is "in" or perhaps of the experience which is unified by a feeling tone that grips you. PREPARATION: 26:30 ff   Lovely quote:  fr. p. 87-- "The work of art has a unique quality [namely] that of clarifying and concentrating meanings contained in  scattered and weakened ways in the material of other [everyday] experience." So it is a kind of crystalization of feelings that stands out as a unified whole. "Great Art" can crystalize profound and or highly significant experience as opposed to more trivial, inconsequential experiences. It does this expressively (it evokes or ellicits a response that is in sync  with what is expressed in the music or painting or what have you). This may have a spiritual component too (c.f. Common Faith). If the art is "great" it is expresses and evokes experiences not just important for one or 2 people , but has importance and significance to many people. It "reaches" many people in a powerful way that grips them, changes their experience. The ability to express such feelings well and effectively is rare, and depends on a lot of work as well as inspiration.

Thanks for this! Would love to see a part 2!

Good talk John.  Glad to see you’ve returned to posting videos recently.  Your videos always take me back to your great lecturing at UofG.

If you ever end up teaching Dewey’s Democracy and Education, post of videos for it!

Thank you for this.  I was aware that Western art theory was heading in this direction at the beginning of the 20thC. Probably a bit earlier as I'm no expert. It seems to culminate in various art movements like for example Abstract Expessionism, which I find particularly engaging. This book by Dewey sounds really interesting.

I'm right in the middle of a book on Chinese painting and poetry in the 11th and 12thC where, as long ago as that, their art theory was very much in this vein. Here are two quotes I read just hours before watching this:

"In Zhang Zi's appraisal, painting what is true is not a matter of acheiving verisimilitude with the visual world, but of getting at what is authentic, what is pyschologically and emotionally true."
"Gaining a new insight while viewing a painting allows the viewer to see familiar images with new eyes."

I'm really captivated by the landscape painting of that era. It seems the painter didn't stand in front of a mountain or by a river to depict such a scene but he would roam the countryside, encounter many mountains and rivers and then express those encounters in a painting. Some of those that survive from that time are simply extraordinary and have a quality of something ineffable, almost spiritual. They make you want to enter the landscape and roam around within.

Looking forward to the next instalment.

very good explaination .... i couldn´t really wrap my head around aesthetics, until now ^^
thank you :)

Thank you. Cannot wait for the next parts.

Gratitude

I loved this video!! Thank you so much for posting this online. I really enjoyed and got so much out of it.

What a helpful articulation of Dewey’s ideas. I’ve wrestled with this book for some time now but this just put some wind in my sails. Are you still going to release a part 2 ? Looking forward to it.

Richard Rorty mirrored Dewey too, as do I.

Is there a second video of dewey?

Is this video a part of a new course?

Art is an attempt at unification.
Artworks are severed illusions.

What a helpful articulation of Dewey’s ideas. I’ve wrestled with this book for some time now but this just put some wind in my sails. Are you still going to release a part 2 ? Looking forward to it.