Dewey's Art as Experience - Ch 13: Criticism and Perception

Hello everybody and welcome back once again to Great Texts. We're still talking about John Dewey's artist experience and this week we're discussing chapter 13, Criticism and Perception. Let me set up the problem that I think this chapter really addresses. I think it's a crucial question or problem for Dewey's aesthetic theory, namely what can art criticism be and what is it for in Dewey's theory? And there are several aspects of Dewey's theory I think that make it clear that this is an issue. So one is the various criticisms that Dewey gives in prior chapters of naive or outmoded standards for art. Another is the individuality of all works of art. He also, you know, just the very fact that for Dewey art is, the work of art is an experience, right, rather than an external thing, raises this problem of then what is art criticism about. The untranslatability of any work of art from its medium to another medium, including the medium of scholarly prose or journalistic prose, raises the question then what is art criticism for? How can it work, right? And that the experience of art is characterized in an essential way by a pervasive unifying quality that is unique to each work and experience of the work and which in a sense is itself ineffable or untranslatable, right? All of these things I think give us, like they raise a question of how is it that Dewey's theory of art can explain what the art critic or the art scholar is doing when they're commenting on a piece of art on a work? Okay, so let's back up for a moment. I mean, what do we mean when we talk about art criticism in general, right? And I think we're typically referring to one of three types of things. One is kind of journalistic criticism, sort of commentary, reviews, ratings, right, that one might find in a newspaper or popular source, a blog maybe in today's day and age. For film, you know, popular rating systems, five stars, two thumbs up kind of stuff is a sort of form of journalistic criticism, especially when there's an explanation for why something is rated the way it is. There's also a form of criticism that's internal to the art world, right, that's engaged in by artists and curators, collectors, and other people in those circles, right? And then there's scholarly criticism engaged in primarily by academics, right, people associated with academic institutions published in scholarly journals and books. Now, the boundaries between these three areas are porous and not so sharp, but there's sort of differences of emphasis. Nevertheless, I think Dewey has some pretty negative views about what tends to fall under the heading of art criticism and all of these sorts. So why is that? Well, let's look at what he describes as sort of two forms of bad criticism, two forms, I think, that form extremes, right? So on the one extreme, you have what Dewey calls judicial criticism. Judicial criticism sees the judgment of the art critic as essentially like that of the judge in a court case. It pronounces verdicts, that's the main goal on the art. In this case, it's good art, it's bad art, right? It's fine or it's not fine. The judicial critic attempts to establish a sort of social authority over art. Judicial criticism fixates on technique. It tends to judge the present by the past. It's very beholden to both recent and sometimes classic trends in art history. Judicial criticism is inherently conservative, right? And as such, Dewey thinks it tends to harm the progress of art and ends up looking foolish in retrospect. And Dewey actually refers to a particular showing of avant-garde art at the Armory in 1913 as an example where the critics end up looking foolish in retrospect. Okay, now the other type of criticism Dewey talks about, it's sort of a reaction to judicial criticism, is what he calls impressionist criticism. And only kind of loosely connected with the impressionist movement in art. The idea here is that the art critic just sort of writes down unanalyzed impressions in response to the encounter with the work of art, you know, how it makes them feel and so forth, right? This ends up often being, as Dewey says, a medley of irrelevancies, right? It's actually to Dewey a kind of denial of judgment as such, rather than a form of judgment. For Dewey, the impressions that one has, the sort of feelings and perceptions that one has of art, are the beginning of judgments and criticism, not the end, right? So that's crucial. Now for Dewey, judicial criticism does come from a kind of reasonable place, you know, as Dewey tells us repeatedly, criticism is judgment, and judgment involves, in a certain sense, evaluation, right? But the judicial critic goes too far, setting up standards, acting as if they're a kind of arbiter, and that's where Dewey raises a problem. On the other hand, impressionist criticism is also understandable as a response to the excesses of judicial criticism. The issue in both cases for Dewey is that aesthetic judgment requires something else besides verdicts, ratings, rankings, pronouncements, fixed standards, right? None of those things are appropriate, but also more than a chaos of subjective impressions, right? So, you know, although the sort of perception that one has of art is a crucial starting point for criticism, and for art appreciation, it's not the end point for Dewey. Dewey also is concerned about the way in which art criticism often brings extraneous materials in, and for him this is a big no-no, right? What do I mean by extraneous materials? Well, it might be economic considerations, he gives us a kind of Leninist take on art, or ideological criticism, psychoanalytic materials, historical, biographical materials, sociological, philosophical, and so on, right? So all of these things are kind of extraneous materials, and typically when they're brought into art criticism, they cause two kinds of problems. On the one hand, they lead to art criticism that's reductionistic, right? That reduces the art to its sort of effect as propaganda, or the way in which it's produced under certain economic conditions, or the philosophical ideas that are associated with it. And all of that, Dewey says, is inappropriate. It also leads to the confusion of categories and values that come from mixing up different types of criticism that has different needs. It's not that Dewey thinks that there's no point to inquiries involving these sorts of things. I mean, understanding ancient Greek art, and temples, monuments, sculptures, is helpful to understanding the history of ancient Greece, or to the philosopher trying to understand the writings of Plato or Aristotle, and what they're reacting to. But historical judgment, or philosophical judgment, or even scientific judgments, are not aesthetic judgments. They have a different focus, and different values than art criticism. So that's what Dewey sort of means when he talks about confusion of categories, confusion of values. They're up to something different. Okay, so if art criticism is up to something different, then what is it up to? What is art criticism supposed to do? Well, Dewey tells us that the function of criticism is the re-education of perception of works of art. It is an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and hear. Dewey here is saying, basically, look, the purpose of criticism is to help us perceive better, more deeply, to appreciate aspects of the work of art that we didn't appreciate if we're not used to seeing art of this kind. Continuing on a little bit later in the paragraph, he says, we lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through, in our own vital processes, the processes the artist went through in producing the work. It is the critic's privilege to share in the promotion of this active process. His condemnation is that he so often arrests it. So not only does the critic educate the perceptions of other viewers, they actually help the viewer appreciate the way in which the artist perceives the work when they're producing it, when they're judging it for themselves. This sort of statement of Dewey's of the purpose of criticism and the function of criticism really reminds me of this classic line by William Wordsworth, what we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how. I just love that line and I think it really captures something about education generally, but here the educational function of art criticism. Now Dewey tells us that there are two main elements to critical judgment in general, and in particular in the case of art criticism. So Dewey tells us on the one hand there's discrimination, what we often call analysis. It breaks the work into its constituent parts and looks closely at how those parts are executed. In the case of painting, say, it might look at particular aspects of brush stroke, color, material. And then the second is unification, what we often call synthesis. Unification discovers how the parts come together to create the whole work of art. It tries to understand how all the pieces fit to produce the effect and the quality that they do produce. And it's through these elements of discrimination and unification, analysis, and synthesis that the critic helps the reader of criticism understand how the art work does its work, how it works as an experience. It's also through the unification function of criticism that criticism itself becomes art of its own particular form. Now, I want to leave with this question, I want to end with this question, which I also want to discuss further in class today, for those of you who will be joining us, or on the discussion boards tomorrow, if you won't. It's this question of can the critic judge the value of works of art? So Dewey's already clearly distanced himself from the judicial critic. So it's clear that whatever judgments or evaluations the critic pronounces, they must be indifferent in kind from the judicial critic. And particularly in the sense that the judicial critic sets themselves up as someone who pronounces verdicts with a certain social authority. So the critic, acting appropriately, doesn't do that for Dewey. But does that mean they can't make any statement of good or bad, better or worse, what the quality of this artwork is? And I think Dewey tells us that doing so often leads to problems. But the question is, does it always lead to problems? And I think Dewey does leave some room here. And I'd like to hear what you think about what room he does leave. Not only can the critic judge the value, okay, I've kind of given that away, at least my opinion, he can in some way, but how, right? What's the right way to do it in contrast to the judicial critic? So those are the core things I wanted to talk about today. It's a rich chapter with a lot going on, as usual. So we didn't hit everything, but I think we'll have plenty of time in class and on the discussion board to take up further issues. Let me know what you think of the chapter and this video. Feel free to leave me a comment as well. So otherwise, I'll see you next time for the last chapter of the book, Art and Civilization. We'll wrap up our discussion of Dewey's artist experience, and I look forward to it. So until then, take care. See you later.