Art as Experience

(excerpted from the essay Art as Experience by John Dewey)

Science states meanings; art expresses them. Matisse said that the camera was a great boon to painters, since it relieved them from any appartent necessity of copying objects. Every work of art has a particular medium by which, among other things, the qualitative pervasive whole is carried. In every experience we touch, the world through some particular tentacle; we carry on our intercourse with it, it comes thome to us, through as specialized organ. The entire organism with all it´s charge of the past and varied resources operates through a particular medium, that of eye, as it interacts with the eye, ear, and touch. The fine arts lay hold of this fact and push it to its maximum of significance. Photographs to primitive folk have, so it is said, a fearful magical quality. It is uncanny that solid and living things should be thus presented. To one who is not rendered callous by common contact with pictorial representations there is still something miraculous in the power of a contracted, flat, uniform thing to depict the wide and diversified universe of animate and inanimate things. ´Medium´in fine art denotes the fact that this specialization and individualization of a particular organ of experience is carried to the point wherein all its possibilities are exploited. Medium first of all signifies an intermediary. They are the middle, the intervening, things though which something now remote is brought to pass. Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception. When, for example, paintings are looked at as illustrations of historical scenes, of literature, of familiar scenes, they are not perceived in terms of their media. Analysis of the former becomes a substitute  for enjoyment of the latter.

Physcially, a brush and the movement of the hand in applying color to canvas are external to painting. Not so artistically. The difference between external and intrinsic operations runs through all the affairs of life. One student studies to pass an examination, to get a promotion. To another, the means, the activity of learning, is completely one with what results from it. The consequence, instruction, illumination, is one with the process. Sometimes we journey to get somewhere else because we have business at the latter point and would gladly, were it possible, cut out the travelling. At other times we journey for the delight of moving about and securing what we see. Means and end coalesce.

The artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works. To say that a work of art is or is not representative is meaningless. It is absurd to ask what an artist really meant by his product; he himself would find different meanings in it at different days and hours and in different stages of his own development. If he could articulate, he would say Í meant just that, and that means whatever you or any one can honestly, that is in virtue of your own vital experience, get our of it.´ Craftsmanship to be artisitc in the final sense must be ´loving.´It must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised

By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the couse of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theorry depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often indentified with the building, booking, painting, or statue in its existence apart from the human experience. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience. When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. In all ranges of experience, externality of means defines the mechanical. A large part of popular revulsion against utilitarianism in moral theory is because of its exaggeration of sheer calculation.

Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges. An actual poem is a succession of experiences - sounds, images, thought - through which we pass when we read a poem. And it is also true that it exists in unnumerale qualities or kinds, no two readers having exactly the same experience.

Art denotes a process of doing or making. This is as true of fine as of technological art. Art involves a molding of clay, chipping of marble, casting of bronze, laying on of pigments, construction of buildings, singing of songs, playing of instruments, enacting roles on the stage, going through rhythmic movements in the dance. Every art does something with some physical material, the body or something outside the body, with or without the use of intervening tools, and with a view to productions of something visible, audible, or tangible. So marked is the active or ´doing´ phase of art, that the dictionaries usually define it in terms of skilled action, ability in execution.
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To have form marks a way of envisaging, of feeling, and of presenting experienced matter so that it most readily and effectively becomes material for the construction of adequate experience on the part of those less gifted than the original creator.

When past and present fit exactly into one another, when there is only recurrence, complete uniformity, the resulting experience is routine and mechanical; it does not come to consciousness in perception. The inertia of habit overrised adaption of the meaningt of the here and now with that of experiences, without which there is no consciousness, the imaginative phase of experience. Unless the sense were immediate, we would have no guide to our reflection. The sense of an extensive and underlying whole is the context of every experience and it is the essence of sanity. For the mad, the insane, thing to us is that which is torn from the common context and which stands alone and isolated, as anything must which occurs in a world totally different from ours. Without an indeterminate and undetermined setting, the material of any experience is incoherent. Steam did the physical work and produced the consequences that attend any expanding gas under definite physical conditions. The sole difference is that the conditions under which it operates have been arranged by human contrivance.The work of art however, unlike the machine, is not only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively rather than in the realm of physical existences.

The uniqueness of esthetic experience is a challenge to thought, in particular the systematic thought called philosophy, for esthetic experience is experience in it´s integrity - experience freed from the forces that impede and confuse it´s development as experience; freed from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself. But it is shown that the system in question has superimposed some preconceived idea upon experience instead of encouraging or even allowing estheic experience to tell its own tale. 

Human Capital

The use of leisure time to improve skills and knowledge for the most part, goes unrecorded. But in this way, the quality of human effort can be greatly improved and its productivity enhanced. Such investment in human capital accounts for the most impressive rise in real earnings per worker. By investing in themselves, people can enlarge the range of choice available to them.

The failure to treat human resources explicitly as a form of capital - as a produced means of production, as the product of investment, has fostered the retention of the classical notion of labor as a capacity to do manual work requiring little knowledge and skill a capacity with which, according to this notion, laborers are endowed about equally. Counting individuals who can and want to work and treating such a count as a measure of the quantity of an economic factor is no more meaningful than it would to count the number of all manner of machines to determine their economic importance either as a stock of capital or as a flow of productive services. 

New capital from foreign countries can be put to good use, it is said, only when it is introduced slowly and gradually. But this experience is at variance with the widely held impression that countries are poor fundamentally because they are starved for capital and that additional capital is truly the key to their more rapid economic growth. The reconciliation is to be found in emphasis on particular forms of capital. The new capital from the outside that is going into the formation of structures, equipment and sometimes into inventories, is usually not available for additional investment in man. Consequently, human capabilities do not stay abreast of physical capital and they do become factors in economic growth. Human resources have both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. The number of people, the proportion who enter upon useful work, and hours worked are essentially quantitative characteristics.

How to distinguish between expenditures for consumption and for investment. This distinction bristles with both conceptual and practical difficulties. We can think of three classes of expenditures: expenditures that satisfy consumer preferences and in no way enhance the capabilities under discussion - these represent pure consumption; expenditures that enhance capabilities and do not satisfy any preferences underlying consumption - these represent pure investment; and expenditures that have both effects. Most relevant activities clearly are in the third class, partly consumption and party investment, which is why the task of identifying each component is so formidable and why the measurement of capital formation by expenditures is less useful for human investment than for investment in physical goods. In principle, there is an alternative method for estimating human investment, namely by its yield rather than its cost.

Logistics

It goes without saying that the logistics sector shares a common interest with society in advancing trade and accelerating job creation, increased opportunities for business growth throughout market connectivity and wealth creation for billions of consumers worldwide. A successful supply chain is one that shares data between multiple parties - manufacturers, customs departments, logistics providers and retailers. All cities are concerned with flows: of people, vehicles, goods, services, waste, energy and even data. Larger cities, with ever-greater complexity, will require increased levels of control to coordinate freight flows, and possibly eliminate extraneous vehicle movements. The situation today in many cities is sub-optimal with, on average, trucks plying less than half full and many businesses receiving numerous deliveries over the day, when one or two full truckloads would suffice.

Consolidation centers store goods bound for the same location and can be aggregated and stored until the optimum time for delivery, often during off-peak periods. DHL's Smart Truck allows fright deliveries not only to be tracked but planned and updated in a real time environment. The global penetration of smartphones offers new possibilities of logistics solutions customized for individual citizens. Shipping is increasingly reliant on IT - from navigation to propulsion, from freight management to traffic control.

Post harvest losses manifest themselves at any point between harvest and consumption. Causes: poor harvesting and handling practices, inadequate techniques for drying and monitoring moisture levels; lack of appropriate storage leading to bio-deterioration or pest-attack; and inefficient transportation. Other factors include poor marketing and distribution policies and inadequate financial infrastructure that affects, for instance, the ability of producers to get payments for their goods or to finance their activity.

In the case of India, one of the core reasons behind the persistently high level of wastage is the extreme level of fragmentation involved in both production and food supply chains as a whole - all the way from harvesting to handling, threshing, drying, storing, transporting, performing quality control, processing, packaging, marketing and distribution to final consumption. Agricultural production is often dominated by small farmers who have limited access to technologies and financial resources. They do no possess, for instance, the equipment required to ensure proper temperature at storage and there is lack of understanding of how to efficiently handle produce. On top of this transport systems and warehousing are often underdeveloped. As a result of which transport costs are particularly high in rural areas. The World Bank estimates that transport costs per ton-kilometer from farm to primary markets are 3-5 times higher than those from secondary to wholesale markets in capital cities.

Critical Thinking

How can humans create within their own minds such an inconsistent amalgam of the rational and the irrational? The answer is self-deception. In fact, perhaps the most accurate and most useful definition of humans is that of "the self-deceiving animal." Deception, duplicity, sophistry, delusion and hypocrisy are foundational products of human nature in its "natural" untutored state. Rather than reducing these tendencies, most schooling and social influences redirect them, rendering them more sophisticated, more artful and more obscure.

To exacerbate this problem, not only are humans instinctively self-deceptive, they are naturally socio-centric as well. Every culture and society sees itself as special and as justified in all it's basic beliefs and practices, in all it's values and taboos.

Unfortunately there are an unlimited number of maneuvers one can make in camouflaging poor reasoning, making bad thinking look good and obscuring what is really going on in a situation. Furthermore, most people are hesitant to recognizing poor reasoning when it supports what they intensely believe. It is as if people subconsciously accept the premise, "all is fair in the scramble for power, wealth and status." Any argument, any consideration, any mental maneuver or construction that validates emotionally charged beliefs seems to the believe to be justified. The more intense the belief, the less likely that reason and evidence can dislodge it.

The human mind is often myopic, inflexible and conformist, while at the same time, highly skilled in self-deception and rationalization. People are by nature highly egocentric, highly socio-centric and wantonly self interested. Their goal is not truth but advantage. They have not acquired their beliefs through a rational process. They are highly resistant to rational critique.

Blind faith, fear, prejudice and self interest are primary organizers of much human thinking. Self delusion, in conjunction with lack of self command, characterize much human thinking. A highly compromised integrity is the result. If you point out a mistake in thinking to most persons, you may silence them momentarily. But most, like rubber bands that have momentarily been stretched and let go, will soon revert back to whatever it was they believed in the first place. It is for this reason that cultivation of intellectual virtues is so crucial to human development. Without long term transformation of the mind, little can be done to produce deeply honest thought. When challenged, the human mind operates from it's most primitive intellectual instincts.

Critical thinking enables us to take command of the abstractions we create in our own minds, the generalizations we make about the world and therefore, ultimately the quality of our reasoning.

There is a small group of people who, though intellectually skilled do not want to manipulate or control others. These are people who combine critical thought, fair mindedness, self-insight and a genuine desire to serve public good. They are sophisticated enough to recognize how self-serving people use their knowledge of human nature and command of rhetoric to pursue selfish ends. They are acutely aware of the phenomenon of mass society and of the machinery of mass persuasion and social control. Consequently, they are too insightful to be manipulated and to ethical to enjoy manipulating others. They have a vision of a better, more ethical world, which includes a realistic knowledge of how far we are from that world. They are practical in their effort to encourage movement from "what is" to "what might be." They gain insight by struggling with their own egocentric nature and coming to see, in deeper and deeper ways, their own involvement in irrational processes.

Feldman on Music & Time

"I think that's always very interesting about music. I think that throughout it's history, it's only going to have a great past. Never a future. Because you know, I remember as a kid on the New York subway, it was always good to stand at the end of the train and getting into the station at the last moment, by looking backwards. And to me that's what music is. There's something about music that's not visionary. As much as people talk about music of the future. There's something about music that always seems to come out of looking backwards." - Morton Feldman
(excerpted from an interview by Charles Shere) 

"I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being  might be free, (…) that they should breathe, (…) that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it."

"I am interested in getting Time into its unstructured existence. That is, I am interested in how this wild beast lives in the jungle – not in the zoo. I am interested in how Time exists before we put our paws on it – our minds, our imaginations, into it. (…) This was not how to make an object, not how this object exists by way of Time, in Time or about Time, but how this object exists as Time. Time regained. Time as an Image."

"If I can annoy you with another bon mot. Degas, you know, spent too much of his time writing sonnets. So he meets Mallarmé on the street, and Mallarmé says, "How are the sonnets going?" And Degas says, "I don't have any ideas. So Mallarmé says, "You don't write poetry with ideas. You write it with words." European you know, Mallarmé. Are there any questions?"