Pragmatist Aesthetics and New Visions of the Contemporary Art Museum:
The Tate Modern and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

by Angela Marsh

John Dewey mandated the repositioning of our experience of art within the realm of the everyday, and recognized the importance of art objects principally with regard to how they operate within an experience as “carriers of meaning.” In this quote from Art as Experience, Dewey illustrates the segue between art and the perceiver, and his belief that within the profound art experience, lived dichotomies are healed:

In art as an experience, actuality and possibility or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response, the
individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning, are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection.