An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

collective life. But they are also marvelous aids in the creation of such a life.

The reconciling of the material of experience in the act of expression is not an

isolated event confined to the artist and to a person here and there who

happens to enjoy the work. In the degree in which art exercises its office, it

is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of

greater order and unity.^70

This, or something like it, remains true, even if art never exercises its office

quite wholly and unambiguously, in the conditions of social actuality under

which we live.

Some contemporary practices of art: primitivism,

vernacularism, avant-gardism, and constructivism

Both the traditional media of art–architecture, literature, music, painting,

sculpture, and dance–and the more recent media of photography and film

have been clearly shown to offer exemplary possibilities of aesthetic affirm-

ation. There is no chance that the major works in these media -from the

Parthenon and Rouen Cathedral to the photographs of Edward Weston and

the films of Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock–will altogether lose their

holds on our imaginations and on our sense of how imagination might

explore possibilities of meaningfulness (and its inhibition) that are latent in

social actuality. As works are produced and put before audiences within each

of these media, we are likely to continue to receive them as satires (comedies

or tragedies) and elegies (idylls and elegies in the narrow sense), and we are

likely to continue to argue about whether they achieve aesthetic affirmation

or whether they are rather tendentious, empty, politicized, merely decora-

tive, entertaining, fun, morbid, witty, moralistic, and so on, as may be.^71 It is

worth a moment’s reflection, however, to consider just how some newly

emerging disciplines of artistic making undertake to achieve aesthetic

affirmation and to present a subject matter as a focus for thought and

emotional attitude, distinctively fused to the imaginative exploration of

material.

A number of varieties of what might be called primitivist (not primitive)

art have become current in recent years. This work seems to aim at inducing

(^70) Dewey,Art as Experience, pp. 80–81.
(^71) See Chapter 7 above.
274 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art