John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality

Chapter 1. The Problems of Art and Life

1 The Problems of Art and Life Many people complain about the lack of beauty in everyday life. On a cold winter day in Washington, D.C., the world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell tried to do something about it. In the middle of the morning rush hour, he stood, unannounced, in a corner of a bustling metro station and played some of the greatest compositions the Western world has produced. Not only did he play great music, but he also used a legendary instrument to do so—his 1713 Stradivarius, rumored to have been purchased for $3.5 million. What was his purpose in pretending to be a common street musician? Bell wanted to see how people focused on hurrying to work would react to an unexpected encounter with art. During his 43-minute performance, 1,097 people passed by and heard his masterful playing; only 7 stopped and listened for more than a minute. Twenty-seven people paused long enough to throw some change into his violin case. A performer who typically commands $1,000 a minute for his performances earned around $32 that morning in the station. 2 John Dewey and the Artful Life Many commuters, driven by their hurried schedule or shielded by the music of their own iPods, passed by and failed to notice him. The only people who seemed to be interested in him and absorbed in the sounds he was creating were children—as they were dragged to daycare by a rushing parent who seemed to have no time to listen to this street musician. Experts and ordinary people alike later judged this experiment to bring great art into the subway to be an extremely discouraging sign for integrating art into everyday life.1 What sense is to be made of this experiment? Does it really show that our modern selves have become so numbed by the burdens of work, the sounds of corporatized music on personal players, and our frequently ugly surroundings that real art stands no chance of making headway into our lives? One may feel a vague suspicion that this experiment leaves out another way of thinking through the problems of an anesthetic, fragmented, and hurried life. Must the only way to get art back into everyday life involve the traditionbound classical masters of music or painting? Think of the individual listening to popular music on his iPod. Surely such a person missed the opportunity to hear a great, albeit incognito, violinist during his subway commute. But is this something to bemoan in and of itself? Reframe the situation, and perhaps one can see the way I want to approach the question of integrating art into daily life—is there a significant difference between the person absorbed in his popular music while riding the subway and the person worrying about the upcoming meeting at work? The former does seem engaged and absorbed in what he is listening to and what he is doing, whereas the latter seems distracted and focused on distant matters. I submit that the former is integrating art into the activities of living, more so than the latter— and that both people need not attend to the world-class violinist to bring art into life. What I am getting at here is the question of how to integrate art into the practical, goal-driven pursuits that we take to be particularly important. These pursuits obviously include the activities of everyday living, as well as the never-ending task of improving what we do, how we do it, and who we are. Does art have an important role to play in a project of living the best life we possibly can live? Does aesthetic experience have any real connection to issues of moral value and moral improvement? What sort of life would we lead if the experiment I described was conclusive, and our lives were bereft of art? If the term ‘‘art’’ can be taken to be a process of careful and skillful creation, what can we say about the ways we create our lives and our everyday experiences? Could we do this in an artful fashion, in a fashion that has a The Problems of Art and Life 3 close connection to that quality of experience we tie to the notion of aesthetic experience? If one can skillfully do things that render more of one’s experience aesthetic in quality, then such activity can be...