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. Aesthetics in Deweyan terms is the study of the manifold ways in which we can find pleasure in awareness of our receptive and perceptive nature. Against the internalist, Romantic idea that holds the work of art to be the spiritualization of matter, Dewey defends the notion of a work of art that is the full-blooded embodiment of an idea vibrant with the taste and touch of concrete experience. It is the product of an integrated experience of the living organism and its environment, a transcript of the artist's total immersion in the perceived world. A paradox of Shusterman's presentation, however, is that, like Dewey, it remains paradoxically abstract about the specifics of the artwork's organic holism. We understand that a work of art resonates with the physical experiences, the materials, cultural prejudices, politics, and realities of everyday life that went into making it. We need only compare a Fra Angelico mural with, say, a Turner, to feel ourselves immersed in two different forms of human experience: the former speaks of a stratified life lit by objective truths that mete out to everything and everyone their place; the latter speaks of an intensely personal vision, of boundless uncertainty, of an odd hybrid of solipsism and panpsychism that proclaims the privatization of consciousness and the decline of socially objective laws--in short, the freedom-shouting bedlam of modern life. Art's inclusion in historical life is, at any rate, undeniable.

However, that a work of art is deeply embedded in the social and spiritual world is no explanation of just what is peculiar about art's connection to experience. The idea that art is the product of the dialogue between a real-life conscious being and his circumstances applies to the manufacture of everything, from pacemakers to highways. Indeed, the marriage of psyche and soma underpins any human product since a product is designed by the mind's wish to alter or improve its environment. Shusterman's Deweyan zest to connect art with the rhythm of life does a good job of debunking the abstract, over-intellectualized understanding of art fostered by the museum and the lecture hall; it is a caveat against embalming expressions whose reason for being was to shout with life. But it leaves one hungry for a description of what makes art's relation to life specifically artistic. Pragmatism's aesthetic theory downplays the repre-sentational dimension of artworks to show that they are performative, gestural entities (in plain speech, a work of art does not just represent, it also enacts what it talks about): they are agents of life, not just make-believe. The performativeness of art, however, seems to me to concede the point about its mimetic...