Here are two passages I've been struck by recently in reading John Dewey's Art as Experience .   (Perigree Trade Paperbacks, Berkeley Publishing Group, Penguin, originally published 1934, edition August 2005 p84, p98. ) Throughout the book, Dewey argues that esthetic experience is a heightening of every day experience, that all experience has, immanently, the possibilities of order and understanding that are reached in esthetic experience.  This continuity used to be more commonly felt and understood when many people were engaged in crafts, and when the arts had not become specialized, cordoned-off areas. [...] more

Some books with which I'm underway: John Dewey, Art as Experience . Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers . John Rewald, A History of Impressionism.   [...] more