Editor’s Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2026
Edited by
Summary
Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living.
IN 1932, AS the first William James Lecturer at Harvard University, American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859–1952) shared his reflections on the experiential engagement between art and viewer. In 1934, these reflections were published as Art As Experience, considered by many to be Dewey's most influential writing on aesthetics.
In his discussion of the “live creature” subject to such experiences, Dewey writes:
works [of art] are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding ... . When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.
This description of the generic work of art extracted from “operation in experience” could just as well take as its subject the museum venue itself. Isolated from the ways in which “live creatures” live (verb, not adjective) museum spaces and experiences, a wall is built around museums too. They have been viewed historically as elite, exclusive and excluding, and impersonal—as antiseptic to intimacy.
And yet it is precisely the intrusion of humanized experiences into museum spaces that has revised this historical vision in the past few decades. Museum experiences—cultivated by curators, educators and marketers alike—have come into sharp focus as the reason for being of these communal spaces.
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- The Museum as ExperienceLearning, Connection, and Shared Space, pp. xi - xviPublisher: Arc Humanities PressFirst published in: 2026
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