Art as an Experience
In
Advance of the Broken Arm, August
1964 (fourth version, after lost original of November 1915)
The piece by Marcel Duchamp was created by him handing a snow shovel from the ceiling of his studio. The work can now be seen displayed at the Museum of Modern Art. Duchamp wanted to challenge the idea of art and its creation. The MOMA states, “His Readymades—mass-produced, functional objects he designated as art—challenged many accepted assumptions and traditions, namely that art should reflect an artist’s skills, or even be handcrafted by the artist. Duchamp asserted that an artist could create simply by making choices” (2025). He wanted to allure how titles affect a work of art and can do little with the artwork itself. Duchamp pushed the meaning of beauty and the eye of the beholder.
Dewey’s idea consists of thinking about the ordinary person when contemplating the artist's experience and their artwork. Dewey states, “The one who sets out to theorize about the esthetic experience embodied in the Parthenon must realize in thought what the people into whose lives it entered had in common, as creators and as those who were satisfied with it, with people in our own homes and one in our streets” (pg. 4, 1958). Dewey explains that aesthetic art should be removed from a pedestal and set to a causal relationship between the art and the viewer. The value of art has shifted in modern art forms that are more accessible to the general public. Dewey states, “The arts which today have most vitality for the average person are things he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip, and, too frequently, newspaper accounts of love nests, murders, and exploits of bandits” (pg. 5-6, 1958). Fine arts have become less mundane, and museums have been having less of an impact than they once did. In contemporary art, there is a hunger for cheap and vulgar work that sets it apart from the spiritual and religious work that has been popular earlier in history. This relates to all forms of art such as paintings, sculptures, music, and theater.
Dewey, J., & Confucius. (1958b). Art as an experience. Listener Educational Enterprises.
Moma: The Museum of Modern Art, New York City. (n.d.). https://www.moma.org
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