# Quote — John Dewey, Art as Experience

> In the development of an expressive act, the emotion operates like a magnet drawing to itself appropriate material: appropriate because it has an experienced emotional affinity for the state of mind already moving. Selection and organization of material are at once a function and a test of the quality of the emotion experienced. In seeing a drama, beholding a picture, or reading a novel, we may feel that the parts do not hang together. Either the maker had no experience that was emotionally toned, or, although having at the outset a felt emotion, it was not sustained, and a succession of unrelated emotions dictated the work. In the latter case, attention wavered and shifted, and an assemblage of incongruous parts ensued. The sensitive observer or reader is aware of junctions and seams, of holes arbitrarily filled in. Yes, emotion must operate. But it works to effect continuity of movement, singleness of effect amid variety. It is selective of material and directive of its order and arrangement. But it is not what is expressed. Without emotion, there may be craftsmanship, but not art; it may be present and be intense, but if it is directly manifested the result is also not art.

- Author: [John Dewey](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-dewey.md)
- Book: [Art as Experience](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-dewey/art-as-experience.md)
- Page: 72
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dewey#Art_as_Experience_(1934)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-dewey/art-as-experience/in-the-development

## More from this book

> Naturalism is a word of many meetings in philosophy as well as in art. like most isms — classicism and romanticism, idealism and realism in art — it’s has become an emotional term, a war cry of partisans.

p. 157 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-dewey/art-as-experience/naturalism-is-a-word.md)

> The recurrence of relations—not of elements—in different contexts, which constitutes transposition is qualitative and hence directly experienced in perception.

p. 219 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-dewey/art-as-experience/the-recurrence-of-relations-not.md)

> Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value.

p. 126 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-dewey/art-as-experience/even-the-eye.md)