Rummaging through notes, found Chris Beier’s excellent summation of John Dewey’s ideas about experiencing art.
Dewey claims we should be looking at not the physical work (an urn, a painting) but the experience of engaging with it. … all experiences take place over time, and no experience can be instantaneous. …though (paintings) are physically, static objects, they’re experienced through the exploration of the composition over time.
This means that “the emotional unfolding of an experience is fundamentally ordered”. Furthermore, the ordered unfolding of the recollected experience accounts for how we “explain the orderings that are enjoyable in stories” because the building, plateauing, and unwinding of narrative stuctures mirrors the process of evolutionary fitness.
Fitness is a continuous scale, which we can understand as a growing and shrinking delta between a complete unity with the environment—that is, the ideal state for the creature—and the actual state of the creature. Narratively-satisfying emotion is produced by the rhythm of that delta growing and shrinking over time.
Satisfying experiences mostly follow a “need → effort → fulfillment → satisfaction” cycle because they “come from the process of taking actions that have the effect of improving fitness”.
Fitness moving back towards equilibrium produces narratively-satisfying emotion.
Experiences are driven by and judged on fulfillment rather than mere enjoyment. In the age of mass distraction and mediocre art, this is renewing rhetoric not just for the cornered artist, but also the cornered product manager, the cornered service provider, the cornered designer, the cornered engineer.