John Dewey Art as Experience   1934 
Dewey’s Books
•	How We Think (1910) 
•	German Philosophy and Politics (1915) 
•	Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education (1916) 
•	Reconstruction in Philosophy (1919) 
•	Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology 
•	Experience and Nature (1925) 

Art as Experience (1934)

•	The Public and its Problems (1927) 
•	The Quest for Certainty Gifford Lectures (1929) 
•	Art as Experience (1934) 
•	A Common Faith (1934) 
•	Experience and Education (1938) 
•	Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) 
•	Freedom and Culture (1939) 
•	Theory of Valuation (1939). 
•	Knowing and the Known (1949) 

The Live Creature
•	The existence of works of art has become an obstruction to aesthetic theory.
–	As external physical objects they seem independent of human experience.
–	The actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience.
–	The perfection of some of these products, their classic status, isolates them from their human conditions of origin and from their consequences.
And this makes their general significance opaque.
•	Art is remitted to a separate realm, cut off from the materials and aims of other forms of human effort, undergoing and achievement.
•	Works of art are refined and intensified forms of experience.
•	Task:  to restore continuity between these and everyday events.
Experience

–	“Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of the live creature and its environing conditions is involved in the very process of living.”
–	“Under conditions of resistance and conflict aspects of the self qualify the experience with emotions and ideas” giving rise to conscious intent.
Often the experience is inchoate [meaningless].
•	Things are not composed into an experience.  
•	The experience is characterized by distraction and dispersion.
•	What we observe and what we think, desire and get, are at odds. 
•	We start and stop because of interruptions or laziness, not because of reaching the desired end.

an experience

•	“The material experienced runs its course to fulfillment.”
•	Only then is it integrated within, and demarcated from, other experiences.
•	When a piece of work is finished satisfactorily its close is a consummation, not a cessation.
•	It is a whole, has its own individualizing quality, is self-sufficient, has its own beginning and end.
Allan Kaprow, Fluids, 1967, photo Dennis Hopper. 
Allan Kaprow (1927- 2006)
   -  was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. 
   -  invented the term “Happening” in the 1950s.
   - was an avid reader of Dewey.

Calling, Allan Kaprow, 1962
(This Happening took place unannounced in Grand Central Station, New York City)
Experiences have their own beginning and end.
–	Life is a thing of histories.
•	each [story in life] with its own plot
•	inception, movement, and close
•	rhythmic movement
•	pervading quality

"real experiences"  

•	"that was an experience"
•	They include events that were tremendously important: e.g. a fight with a lover, an averted catastrophe.
•	Or less important:  the meal in a Paris restaurant that was an enduring memorial to food. 
Manresa Restaurant, Los Gatos
Tasting Menu: $255
Beverage Pairing: $198
Exotic citrus with honey and spices. 
•	“A covey of various citric supremes, all sauced in fennel frond-infused Meyer lemon rind purée and atop Corsican lemon curd, was covered in granité of oroblanco pomelo beneath spearmint ice cream and a crown of orange tuile. The underlying set of segments, supplied by Gene Lester, from his collection of exotic and unusual citrus in Watsonville, and which included rare breeds like temple tangor (tangerine-orange hybrid) and wikiwatangelo (tangerine-pomelo and grapefruit), were especially juicy with a tart-sweetness that was amplified by the acidic, sticky lemons and sweet pomelo ice. The ice cream was fresh and cooling, whilst the tasty tuile added crunch.”

William Turner. A Storm (Shipwreck). 1823. Watercolour on paper. British Museum, 
Here, every successive part flows freely into what comes next.

–	But we can still identify the parts.
–	The flow gives definiteness and interest to the successive parts.
–	The flow is from something to something.
–	As one part leads into another and carries what came before, each gains distinctness.
–	The whole has successive phases. 
There are no holes or mechanical connecting points in an experience.
–	However, there are pauses that define the quality of movement, and sum up what has happened.
–	In a work of art, different acts and episodes melt into a unity without losing their character, like a friendly conversation in which the speakers manifest their characters more clearly.

1897
An experience has a unity which gives it its name: "that storm."

–	This unity is constituted by a pervasive single quality.
–	It is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual  [it is all three], although, in talking about it afterward, we may find that one of these characterizes it as a whole.
thinking as “an experience”
•	A scientist or philosopher may have “an experience” which is essentially intellectual, but also emotional.  A thinker is lured into his activity by such.  
•	He can use these experiences to distinguish real from fake thought.
•	Thinking is formed by trains of ideas, but the ideas are phases of a developing underlying quality.
•	They are not separate and independent like John Locke or David Hume’s ideas.

El Greco “Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane” 1595

Henri Matisse, “Joie de Vivre,” 1905-6

Matisse's L'Odalisque, harmonie bleue (1937) 
African-American connections
•	Dewey was probably influenced by African-American Philosopher Alain Locke. “[Dewey] was also associated, mainly through [Albert] Barnes, with African-American culture. Barnes was invited to write a chapter for The New Negro edited by Alain Locke [in 1925] and one of the founding documents of the Harlem Renaissance. The students in Dewey's and Barnes' first experimental classes in art education were mainly from the black working class. Barnes collected African-American art and also encouraged African-American students to study at the Barnes Foundation.” Tom Leddy. “John Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/

“Seated Couple” by the Dogon peoples at the Barnes Foundation, Late 19th early 20th century

Alain Leroy Locke (1885-1954)
•	“was an American writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts. Distinguished as the first African American Rhodes Scholar in 1907, Locke was the philosophical architect—the acknowledged “Dean”—of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of cultural efflorescence connected with the “New Negro” movement from 1919–1934” Wikipedia

•	In 1927 Aaron Douglas and Gwendolyn Bennett (artist and writer) were the first African-Americans to receive a scholarship to the Barnes Foundation.   Cheryl R. Rager. Plunging into the Very Depths of The Souls of our People:  The Life of Aaron Douglas (ProQuest 2008) PhD. Thesis University of Kansas. Google.com books.  
Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, 1934.  Schomburg Center, New York Public Library. 
Aaron Douglas, “Song of the Towers” 1934
Gwendolyn Bennett, poet, artist, 1902-1981
Dewey:  art should remove prejudice
“the moral function of art . . . is to remove
prejudice, do away with the scales that keep
the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive.”  Art as Experience, 328
Doing 
•	Art (both fine and technological) denotes a process of doing and making. (207)

Molding of clay…etc.

–	Art does something with some material with a view to producing something visible, audible or tangible
–	This is the “doing” phase:  skilled action.
–	OED def of art: skill
–	J.S. Mill:  art is after perfection in execution.

Technique vs. Art
•	“esthetic” refers to experience as appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying:  the consumer’s standpoint, in cooking, i.e. taste.
•	But the distinction between the esthetic and the artistic cannot be a separation.
•	Perfection in execution implies those who perceive it, whereas “mere” perfection can probably be better attained by a machine.

•	[Note that the examples so far on this page have been cooking and gardening.  Now for art.]
•	A great artist like  Cézanne  may not be a great technician, and Sargent is a great technician not a great painter. [next Portrait of Madam  Cézanne by Cézanne , 1885-7,and then Nonchaloir (Repose) by John Singer Sargent, 1911]

Craftsmanship
•	Craftsmanship, to be artistic, must be “loving”:  caring deeply about the subject matter.
–	The maker of a highly realist bust is unlike the maker who had an experience of his own that he wants others to share. [Tolstoy]
Auguste Rodin (1840 -1917) 
Danaïd
1889
Framed for Others
•	To be artistic, a work must be esthetic:  framed for others to enjoy.
–	The maker’s perception is mechanical if it is not also esthetic.

Art unites the same relation of doing and undergoing that makes an experience.

•	It eliminates whatever does not contribute to this mutual organization.
•	Man whittles, etc., and his doing is artistic “when the perceived result” is such that its qualities as perceived have controlled production. 
•	So, the artist embodies the perceiver as he or she works.

The Expressive Object
•	Expression signifies both action and result, i.e. product.
•	The product is what says something to us.
•	But the object should not be seen in isolation from the process of its production.
•	Do not ignore the individual contribution that makes something new.
•	On the other hand, isolating expression from the object leads to thinking of expression as merely discharging emotion.
Through Personal Experience
•	What is expressed is something new:  it does not merely represent.
•	It presents material processed through personal experience, although its materials come from the public world and is made to appeal to others.
•	Expression as personal act and objective result are organically connected.

Representation
•	To say a work of art is or is not representative is meaningless since “represent” has many meanings.
•	A work of art is not a literal reproduction since it is unique due to the individual through whom it has been processed.
•	It may represent, however, in telling something to those who enjoy it about the nature of their own experience.  [Bonnard, The Bathroom, 1932]

Meaning
•	A signboard has meaning as external reference, as pointing to something.
•	Other meanings present themselves directly as possessions of objects which are experienced.
•	This meaning is inherent in immediate experience, as in experiencing a garden.
•	A work of art does not have meaning in the way a sign or a math symbol does.

•	It does have meaning in the way a flag does that decorates a ship.
Art Clarifies and Concentrates Meaning
•	But it is wrong to say a work of art possesses meaning so unique that it has no connection with other experience: this is the esoteric theory of fine art.
•	Rather, art clarifies and concentrates meanings contained in other experiences.

Expression vs. Statement
•	Science states meanings, art expresses them.
•	The signboard directs us to the city, but does not supply experience of the city.
•	Statements set conditions under which an experience may be had.
•	For example, that water is H2O is a statement of conditions under which water comes into existence.
Esthetic art constitutes experience.
•	But science does not disclose the inner nature of things.
•	Otherwise it would compete with art.
•	Esthetic art does not lead to experience but constitutes one.
Mazatlan, Mexico   Carnival
•	A city may express itself to the poet, as in a celebration with pageantry, and, if the visitor has the experience, there is an expressive object.
“as Tintern Abbey expressed itself to Wordsworth in and through his poem”  210
•	Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey” 1798  is not a correct descriptive statement but operates in the dimension of experience itself.
•	[Wordsworth never even mentions Tintern Abbey in his poem, which is actually about youthful memories of nature at a spot in a river several miles above the Abbey.  At most the reference to the Abbey in the title is intended to lend the description of nature a spiritual feel.]

Edward Dayes, “Tintern Abbey from across the Wye,” 1794
Substance and Form
•	Objects of art are expressive:  hence art consists of many languages, each related to the individual art’s medium.  
•	Yet, the meanings of architecture, sculpture, etc., cannot be translated into words.  (211)

Others
•	“The work of art is only complete as it works in the experiences of others.” (211)
•	In each case of communication there is the speaker, the thing said, and the one spoken to: even when the audience is not present.

Three 
•	In art, there is the speaker, the thing said, and the person spoken to.
•	The artist has to vicariously become the receiving audience

Matisse, 1908, “Red Room”
 Matisse:  a finished
 work of art is like 
 a new-born child:  
 it needs time for 
 understanding.

Beauty and Self-Expression
•	Beauty is not something that descends from without [vs. Plato]:  it is a name for an esthetic quality that appears whenever material is formed so as to be expressive.  (211)
•	Substance and form fall apart only when the expressive self is taken in isolation.
•	Yet true art is self-expressive when it gives the art the free play and freshness of individuality.  (212) 
Both Self and Public
•	The material out of which a work of art is composed belongs to the common world rather than to the self.
•	The self assimilates the materials of art in a distinctive way to reissue it into the public world.
•	 The new object can become part of the acknowledged world, a “universal.”
Fresh and Vital
•	The material cannot be private, but the manner of saying is individual. 
•	And the manner in which the material is rendered is what makes it fresh and vital.

Perceiving Esthetically
•	We can perceive academically, pedantically, sentimentally or esthetically.
•	If we perceive esthetically we create an experience of which the substance is new.
•	A poem is a succession of experiences.
No Two Readers
•	No two readers experience it in the same way.
•	Every individual brings a way of seeing and feeling to a work:  each creates something new from the material.

A work is actually a work only when it “lives in some individualized experience.” 212.

•	As a physical thing it remains the same throughout the ages: but it is recreated as a work of art every time it is experienced.
•	This is obviously true for a musical score but also for the Parthenon.

Anti-intentionalism
•	“It is absurd to ask what the artist ‘really’ meant by his product”: he would find different meanings at different times.
•	He would say it means whatever we can get out of it.

The Parthenon
•	The Parthenon is universal “because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience.”
•	You cannot experience it as the devout contemporary Athenian would.
•	As an art work the Parthenon was probably called forth by something local.
•	But the substance evoked allows others to have more intense experiences of their own (even today)  (213)

•	Chartres Cathedral, 13th century.  
•	A good Catholic today could not experience what these sculptures meant to the original perceivers.  
Having Form
•	To have form is a way of presenting matter for the experience of those less gifted.
•	You cannot distinguish between form and substance, except on reflection.
•	“The work is matter formed into esthetic substance.”  213
•	The critic must however distinguish between the two:  between the what and the how.  And the artist will do this too when correcting a bad habit.  
•	The act is “what it is because of how it is done.”
The Common Substance of the Arts, and the Pervasive Quality
•	The undefined pervasive quality binds together all the defined elements, making them a whole.
•	Evidence for this is the immediate sense of relevance of the parts to the whole.
•	“A work of art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive, whole…the universe…”  (214)
A Sense of Unity
•	This is why we feel exquisite intelligibility, clarity and even religious feeling, in front of an esthetically intense object.  We experience a “world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live”  (214)
•	“We are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves.”  
World beyond ourselves
•	The work deepens “that sense of an enveloping undefined whole” characteristic of normal experience, and it is felt as an expansion of ourselves.
•	Unless we are egoists, we are “citizens of this vast world beyond ourselves” with which we can feel unity.

The Medium
•	The qualitative pervasive whole is carried by the particular medium of the work.
•	The entire organism of a human operates through the medium of the sense organ as it interacts with other media.
•	The fine arts push the idea of medium to the maximum.
Enhancing Expressiveness
•	In painting, color renders the scene (in intensified expression) without corruption of the non-sight senses.
•	Here, color alone must “carry the qualities of movement, touch, sound” present in ordinary vision, thus enhancing its expressiveness.  
•	Primitive folk find photographs magical, and there is still something miraculous to pictorial representations, as also with the sounds of literature.   
External vs. Internal Means
•	One kind of means is external to what is accomplished, while the other remains immanent in the object.
•	An example of mere means is when the worker works just for the money.
•	But in “media” the means are incorporated into the outcome.
•	A picture painted in watercolor has a different quality than one in oil.
John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925, In a Levantine Port, ca. 1905-1906, watercolor 
Ends and Means Coalesce

•	For a scientist too, there is  a fulfilling and consummatory quality, for conclusions sum up the conditions that lead to them.
•	All cases in which means and ends are external to one another are non-esthetic.

“Brush-strokes are an integral part of the esthetic effect of a painting when it is perceived.”  (217)

•	Franz Hals
•	Malle Babbe
•	1633

Sensitivity to a Medium
•	“Sensitivity to a medium as a medium is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception.”  217
•	“when..paintings are looked at as illustrations of historical scenes, of literature…they are not perceived in terms of their media.”  [like Bell]
•	It is also a problem to approach paintings from a merely technical standpoint.
The Challenge of Philosophy
•	Esthetic experience is imaginative, but then all conscious experience has some imaginative quality:  meanings come in from prior experience.
•	The experience is only human when meaning and value, drawn from what is absent, are present imaginatively.

Mind
•	So all conscious perception is a venture into the unknown, for, in assimilating present to past, it also rewrites the past. 
•	Consciousness does not happen with routine, mechanical experience.
•	Mind defined: the body of organized meanings by means of which events of the present have significance for us. (218)
Imaginative quality
•	When the mind is baffled the stream of meanings becomes matter for [mere] day-dream, and our emotions float in loose connection with such meanings.
•	But in works of art these meanings are embodied in a material as medium.  
•	Imaginative quality dominates here.

Imagination
•	The work of art “unlike the machine, is not only the outcome of imagination, but operates imaginatively” through enlarging and concentrating experience.
•	“the formed matter of esthetic experience directly expresses …the meanings that are imaginatively evoked…” (219) 
•	The work of art is also a challenge for a similar imaginative act for the experiencer.
Challenge
•	This unique quality of esthetic experience is a challenge to thought, especially to philosophy. 
•	Aesthetic experience is “experience in its integrity.”
•	The philosopher must go to aesthetic experience to understand what experience is.

Imaginative vision
•	“Imaginative vision is the power that unifies all the constituents of the matter of a work of art….”  219
•	Most philosophical theories impose a preconceived idea on esthetic experience.  
Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943) British philosopher and historian. 
Books Published
•	Religion and Philosophy (1916) 
•	Roman Britain (1923, ed. 2, 1932)  
•	Speculum Mentis; or The Map of Knowledge (1924) 
•	Outlines of a Philosophy of Art (1925) 
•	The Archaeology of Roman Britain (1930) 
•	An Essay on Philosophic Method (1933, rev. ed. 2005).  
•	Roman Britain and the English Settlements (with J.N.L. Myres) 1936, second edition 1937) 
•	The Principles of Art (1938)  
•	An Autobiography (1939)  
•	The First Mate's Log (1940) 
•	An Essay on Metaphysics (1940, revised edition 1998).  
•	The New Leviathan (1942, rev. ed. 1992)  

R. G. Collingwood   “Principles of Art,” from Principles of Art (1938)
Art and Craft
•	Art proper should be distinguished from craft:  the power to produce preconceived results by means of consciously controlled action.  Chief characteristics of craft:
•	Distinction between means (e.g. tools, machines, fuel) and end
–	Means are actions and should not be confused with part or material.

Art is none of this.

•	Distinction between planning and execution:  craft involves precise foreknowledge. 
•	The end is thought out first.
•	Distinction between raw material and finished product: craft is exercised on the first.
•	Distinction between form and matter:  matter is the raw material, form is what is different.
•	There is a hierarchy of crafts, one supporting others. 

Breakdown of the technical theory
•	On the technical theory:  a poem is means of producing a certain state of mind in the audience through certain processes.
•	But what are the processes:  the poet may get paper and pen, square elbows:  but this is not preparation for the composition.
•	If poetry were craft then all would agree that a poem that did not produce a result in the audience was bad. 
Art Proper (1) As Expression
•	The artist proper has something to do with emotion, but not to arouse it. (197)
•	The most commonplace answer [based on what we habitually say], and the one we want here, is: he expresses them [emotions].

–	This is not a philosophical theory or definition of art but a fact, or a supposed one, which we can later theorize about.  
–	We mean to identify what people are saying when they say “art expresses emotion.”

Van Gogh would agree:
•	Van Gogh says in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888 “I have tried [in The Night Café] to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.” and in another letter to Theo:  “I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime.  So I have tried to express..the powers of darkness in a low public house, by soft …green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace, of pale sulphur.  And all of this with an appearance of Japanese gaiety.” http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/18/534.htm

process of expressing an emotion
•	At first the artist is conscious of having an emotion, but is not of what it is of it:  conscious of a perturbation or excitement, a sense of oppression.
•	He then expresses himself (in language, by speaking).
–	He becomes conscious of the emotion.
–	The sense of oppression has vanished and the mind lightened.
Catharsis
•	This is like "catharsis" by which emotion is earthed, into make-believe [Aristotle never mentions the earthing of emotion:  Collingwood may mean that, for Aristotle, the emotions of pity and fear disappear as when lightening disappears when it goes into the earth, is “earthed.”].
•	Anger is earthed by imagining oneself kicking someone downstairs: one is rid of the anger.
Alleviation
•	Expressing anger by putting it into bitter words is different:  we remain angry but the sense of oppression disappears.
•	Unlike catharsis, the expressed emotion does not disappear: although there is a sense of alleviation in understanding the emotion, for example, as anger.  
No intention to arouse emotion.
•	Expression is not a matter of intending to arouse a like emotion in another, although the artist may intend to make the other understand how he/she feels.
•	The work is addressed primarily to the artist, and secondarily to anyone who can understand.  [Yet later in the book he says that art is collaborative and that the artist is not just expressing a personal emotion.]
•	Unlike someone who seeks to arouse a certain emotion, the artist need not know the audience.
Wrong Terminology
•	There are two wrong ways to look at expression.  [198]
–	by using stimulus and response terminology [as was the case for psychologist B.F. Skinner in writings he began publishing in the same year, 1938]
–	by using means-and-ends terminology where the end is foreseen [as in craft, for example in making tables] 
Expressing an emotion is not describing that emotion. [This and the next slide not included in Ross selection.]

•	For example, the words in which anger is expressed should not use the term "anger."
•	Description, e.g. with epithets in poetry (a word like “dreadful” to express terror) makes the language frigid and unexpressive.
There is no need for a larger scientific language for emotions (from psychology) to improve poetic expression
–	Description generalizes and classifies, whereas expression individualizes:  expresses e.g. the peculiar anger [i.e. the specific anger in this case].
–	Expression is becoming fully conscious of the emotion, expressing all its peculiarities.  [compare to Plato on emotion]  [This is like Sigmund Freud, a contemporary, who believed that in psychoanalysis one can come to understand one’s own emotions.]
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) (1936) by Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí 
Craft (vs. Art)
•	A craft (e.g. that of arousing emotions) has an end that is set out in general terms.  There is always a "right way" to do things in craft.  [Compare to Plato on the three beds.]  [For Collingwood the craft of arousing emotions is one kind of craft, the craft of making tables is another.]
•	For example a table's specifications might in principle be shared by other tables, and a physician seeks to create the condition of recovering from a complaint which can be shared by others.
The so-called artist.
•	The "artist" [so-called:  he doesn’t really believe such an individual is an artist, hence the scare-quotes] sets out to produce an emotion of a certain kind, requiring therefore means of a certain kind.   This is a craft.
•	To produce psychological effects, for example those of magic or amusement, the work must be of a certain kind and no other.
Art Proper and Expression Proper
•	In art proper the artist wants to "get this clear," not a thing of a certain kind clear.  
•	Expression of emotion is not the same as betraying it, showing symptoms of it:  we say that stammering expresses fear, but this is an improper use of "expression" in the context of art. [199]

•	Turning pale is a natural accompaniment to fear but a person who does so does not become conscious of the precise quality of his fear.
•	Confusion of the two senses of expression leads to false critical estimates,[e.g. where the symptom (crying real tears) is seen as good expression in the art of acting.]

The False Actress
•	It is false to think that it is a merit for an actress to weep real tears.
•	Even if the goal is to produce grief in the audience, and acting is a craft and not an art, there may be other ways.

•	If it is art the actress uses expressions in speech and gesture to explore her own emotions, and allow the audience to make a similar discovery about themselves.
•	It is the ability to make clear to herself and her audience what the tears are about that makes her a good actress.
Ranting is not Art
•	The artist never rants, since to rant is to blow off steam, to exhibit emotions, and become an exhibitionist, not an artist.
•	The poets who expressed their indignation about war in verse in hope of infecting others because they wanted to abolish war is not poetry. [vs. Tolstoy]

Wilfred Owen
 (1893-1918, died in WW1)
poet, patriot, solider, pacifist
Anthem for Doomed Youth [selection]

•	What passing-bells for those who die like cattle?
     Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
     Can patter out their hasty orisons [prayers].
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
     Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells;
     And bugles calling them from sad shires.
The Sensuous and the Imaginative
•	Every imaginative experience is a sensuous experience raised to the imaginative level by the act of consciousness.
•	The aesthetic experience is wholly imaginative, and the only power that can generate it is the experiencer’s consciousness.
•	It presupposes a corresponding sensuous experience. 
•	The sensuous experience need not be first.
•	Consciousness transmutes sensation into imagination. 
The Painter in the Studio
•	The sensuous element is the so-called outward element:  the artist’s psycho-physical activity of painting
–	His visual sensation of colors and shapes.
–	His felt gestures of the brush.
–	Seen shapes of the paint patches he puts on canvas.
•	This sensuous experience is needed to externalize aesthetic experience in, for example, a painting.

•	Every element comes under consciousness of artist, e.g. a good painter, converted into imagination at birth
•	Reflection distinguishes the sensuous and imaginative experience.
•	Eddie Martinez Whistles While He Works | ART21 "New York Close Up“ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4IEaFz8x4E

The non-artist and the artist
•	A man who looks at the subject without painting also has aesthetic experience if the experience is transmuted by his imagination:  but far less than the painter.
•	To get more out of an experience you put more into it – the painter puts into it the consciously performed action of painting:  he records looking at the object and painting it together.

Notes from Michael Krausz “Collingwood, R. G.” A Companion to Aesthetics (1995) 75-78
•	Collingwood holds the work exists solely in the mind of the artist as a creation of his imagination:  so a physical painted picture is not a work of art proper.
•	For a tune to exist it is not necessary to hum, sing, play or write it down:  imagining it is sufficient.

•	Frida Kahlo, Mexico, “Self-portrait with Monkey,” 1938

•	Pablo Picasso,
•	“Maya with Doll,”
•	1938
Corrupt Consciousness
•	"Art is not a luxury, and bad art is not a thing we can afford to tolerate.  To know ourselves is the foundation of all life that develops beyond the mere psychical level of experience….
•	Every utterance and every gesture that each one of us makes is a work of art.  [much broader notion of art!]
•	It is important to each one of us in making them, however much he deceives others, he should not deceive himself.  
Bad Art
•	Corruption of consciousness happens when the conscious self disclaims responsibility for feelings and thus tries to escape being dominated by them without the trouble of dominating them.  (224, Collingwood) 
•	This produces bad art.
Self-deception the root of evil
•	“If he deceives himself in this manner, he has sown in himself a seed which, unless he roots it up again, may grow into any kind of wickedness, any kind of mental disease, any kind of stupidity and folly and insanity.  Bad art, the corrupt consciousness, is the true root of evil."  (284-5. Collingwood)

Art is the community’s medicine.
•	The artist, Collingwood says "undertakes his artistic labour not as a personal effort on his own private behalf, but as a public labour on behalf of the community to which he belongs…Art is the community's medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness"  314-316