Art and Criticism: Must Understanding be Interpretive?

Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. 2^nd Edition. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2000. Pp. 346.

It has become–ironically–traditional to say that modernity hates tradition. Richard Shusterman joins an illustrious delegation of artists and philosophers (including Schelling, Nietzsche, Valéry, the Avant-Garde, the Futurists, Dewey, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) who want to break art away from the museum and the academy. Among these fellow art liberators, Shusterman focuses especially on the great American philosopher John Dewey, who lodged perhaps the most thoroughgoing philosophical objection to the cultural intellectualization of art. The first chapters of Pragmatist Aesthetics are a presentation of Dewey’s socially integrated, holistic understanding of art. Against the abstract, cliquish consignment of art to the lofty reaches of both society and the intellect, Dewey advocates the unification of art and experience. In a rhetoric that puts one in mind of turn-of-the-century beachside gymnastics in baggy shorts, Dewey wants to recover the lost connection between aesthetic experience and our physical self. Art, he claims, appeals not just to the culturally refined intellect but to the whole spectrum of sensual and social life. It speaks to our living, breathing, moving, time- and space-bound persons and thus enhances our total perception of life.