For Dewey it was the experience, that was where the art happened.

Interviewee: Mary Jane Jacob

For John Dewey it was in experience that art happens. With that definition as the basis for his aesthetic theory, he looked at the many ways that people make meaning in their lives. To Dewey, what we make in and of our lives matters. That making can happen in many different ways: making a chair, a painting, a garden, a family, anything that we are consciously absorbed in and invested and through which we practice our values. If we look at art and acts of making in a non-hierarchical way, then social practice offers many invested and meaningful examples. Dewey was also not non-hierarchical in his way of thinking about aesthetic experience: it could happen with art, nature, or anything else that proved to be meaningful to us.