Virtual Spaces

“The artist works to create an audience to which he does communicate. In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.” (p. 109)

The following quotations that have been pulled from chapter five of John Dewey’s Art as Experience make the case for the absolute necessity of art in the virtual world. There has been a lot of debate as of late about the nature of in-person instruction and how vital it is to the success of our students, and the music education community, who relies heavily on what a classroom teacher might call “project-based learning,” has been particularly worried. Choral teachers have been disheartened by rehearsals that are all but silent, as students are singing while muted, and elementary educators whose job it is to cultivate the ear have been rightfully worried about to structure meaningful learning experiences.

But the type of communication that is made possible through art is a special brand that is needed to deal with learning in isolation. I can think of no more fitting description for the virtual learning space than Dewey’s “gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.” (p. 109) We have a unique tool at our disposal. I see two immediately necessary outcomes. We can use individually created works of art that capture what we’re going through in isolation to share with our classmates and at-school families in a way that mere words cannot, giving our at-school families a way to truly empathize with what we’re going through. We can also share in art consumption together and discuss what we were feeling through twenty-something different lenses built from twenty-something different individual experiences.

Something that was touched on very briefly in the chapter but of vital importance is the idea that “a skilled surgeon is the one who appreciates the artistry of another surgeon’s performance; he follows it sympathetically” (p. 102). The shared, sympathetic experiences that art can create can only happen if we give our students the technical knowledge to follow the experience. In our virtual spaces of learning, we still have to learn the fundamentals so that we can participate in the expressive.

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“A signboard has meaning when it says so many miles to such and such a place, with an arrow pointing the direction. But meaning in [this case] has a purely external reference… Meaning does not belong to the… signboard of its own intrinsic right. [It has] meaning in the sense in which an algebraic formula or a cipher code has it… It directs one’s course to a place, say a city. It does not in a way supply experience of that city even in a vicarious way. What it does do is to set forth some of the conditions that must be fulfilled in order to procure that experience. (pp. 87-88)

“The painter did not approach the scene with an empty mind, but with a background of experiences long ago funded into capacities and likes, or with a commotion due to more recent experiences… the passionateness that marks observation goes with the development of the new form… but it is not independent of some prior emotion that has stirred in the artist’s experience; the latter is renewed and re-created through fusion with an emotion belonging to vision of esthetically qualified material.” (p. 91)

“Were it possible for an artist to approach a scene with no interest and attitudes, no background of values, dawn from his prior experience, he might, theoretically, see lines and colors exclusively in terms of their relationships as lines and colors. But this is a condition impossible to fulfill. Moreover, in such a case there would be nothing for him to become passionate about.” (p. 93)

“Aspects and states of his prior experience of varied subject-matters have been wrought into his being; they are the organs with which he perceives. Creative vision modifies these materials. They take their place in an unprecedented object of a new experience. Memories, not necessarily conscious but retentions that have been organically incorporated in the very structure of the self, feed present observation.” (p. 93)

“The conception that objects have fixed and unalterable values is precisely the prejudice from which art emancipates us.” (p. 99)

“There must be indirect and collateral channels of response prepared in advance in the case of one who really sees the picture or hears the music. This motor preparation is a large part of esthetic education in any particular line. To know what to look for and how to see it is an affair of reading on the part of motor equipment. A skilled surgeon is the one who appreciates the artistry of another surgeon’s performance; he follows it sympathetically… the one who knows something about the relation of the movements of the piano-player to the production of music from the piano will hear something the mere layman does not perceive.” (p. 102)

“Different lines and different relations of lines have become subconsciously charged with all the values that result from what they have done in our experience in oru every contact with the world around us. The expressiveness of our lines and space relations in painting cannot be understood upon any other basis.” (p. 105)

Of Vernon Lee, “The essential thing esthetically is our own mental activity of starting, traveling, returning to a starting point, holding onto the past, carrying it along.... The resulting relations define shape and shape is wholly a matter of relations. They ‘transform what would otherwise be meaningless juxtapositions or sequences of sensations into the significant entities which can be remembered and cognized’… the outcome is empathy in its true meaning.” (p. 106)

“The process of living is continuous; it possesses continuity because it is an everlastingly renewed process of acting up on the environment and being acted upon by it together with institution of relations between what is done and what is undergone. Hence experience is necessarily cumulative and its subject matter gains expressiveness because of cumulative continuity. The world we have experienced becomes an integral part of the self that acts and is acted upon in further experience. In their physical occurrence, things and events experienced pass and are gone. But something of their meaning and value is retained as an integral part of the self.” (p. 108)

“Familiarity induces indifference, prejudice blinds us; conceit looks through the wrong end of a telescope and minimizes the significance possessed by objects in favor of the alleged importance of the self. Art throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of experienced things; it quickens us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms.” (p. 108)

Dewey, J. (1934). The Expressive Object. In J. Dewey (Author), Art as experience (pp. 85-109). New

York City, NY: Perigree.