But is it Art?, Cynthia Freeland

Can art break down barriers among cultures? John Dewey thought so; he wrote in his 1934 book Art as Experience that art is the best possible window into another culture. Insisting that ‘art is a universal language’, Dewey urged us to strive to achieve the internal experience of another culture. He thought this required an immediate encounter, and not studying ‘external facts’ about geography, religion, and history: ‘Barriers are dissolved, limiting prejudices melt away, when we enter into the spirit of Negro or Polynesian art. This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected but reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude’.