contrast, to some extent solicited and sustained by how just this formal
arrangement presents its subject matter, then and only then is it the kind
of attention that is appropriate to and characteristic of successful art.^66
Pleasure in formal arrangement is one criterion of art. This is the point that
Dewey is making when he contrasts“complete surrender in perception”^67 to
the work of art with the tendency to withdraw from perception, message in
pocket, in order to act. Similarly, Roger Scruton notes that we take an
aesthetic interest in an objectxor an interest inx“for its own sake”if and
only if the answer to the question“Why are you interested inx?”consists in a
further description ofx.^68 Our attention must be held by justthisformal
arrangement (of material-representational-expressive elements). Dewey
notes that“one does not want the object for the sake of something else.”^69
It is easy, however, to overstate this point and so to suggest thatonly
formal arrangement, independent of representational and expressive dimen-
sions, matters for the experience of art. Kant, Bell, and Beardsley, among
others, are often accused of this sort of overstatement, with some initial
plausibility even if without final justice.^70 Dewey is correcting both Kant and
his own overstatement when he immediately adds that the aesthetic(^66) See Richard Eldridge,“Form and Content: An Aesthetic Theory of Art,”British Journal of
Aesthetics25 (1985), reprinted inPhilosophy of Art, ed. Neill and Ridley, pp. 239–53. Robert
Kaufman makes a similar argument in contrasting the continuing presence of aesthetic
aura(as theorized by Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht) in difficult, often horrifying modern
art with mere culinary or aestheticistaura–a less interesting matter more or less of
surface. The function of genuine aesthetic aura is to invite, sustain, and direct the
invigoration of our attentive powers. (Kaufman,“Aura, Still,”October99 (winter 2002),
pp. 45–80; and Kaufman,“Lyric Commodity Critique, Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baude-
laire Baudelaire Baudelaire,”PMLA123, 4 ( January 2008), pp. 207–15. For a general
argument about literary form as a device of attention, see Richard Eldridge,“Introduc-
tion: Philosophy and Literature as Forms of Attention,”inThe Oxford Handbook of Philoso-
phy and Literature, ed. Richard Eldridge (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 3–15.
(^67) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 269.
(^68) Scruton,Art and Imagination, p. 143.
(^69) Dewey,Art as Experience, p. 254.
(^70) For useful accounts of how even Bell, despite his remarks about significant form as the
sole focus of attention to art, in the end takes significant form itself to have a further
representational function in presenting the reality of“things in themselves,”see Thomas
M. McLaughlin,“Clive Bell’s Aesthetic: Tradition and Significant Form,”Journal of Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism35, 4 (summer 1977), pp. 433–43.
72 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art