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This book is built on three legs: philosopher John Dewey's (1934) Art as Experience, and the teachings of artist Henry Schaefer-Simmern (to whom the book is dedicated) and poet Kenneth Koch. Schaefer-Simmern and Koch taught their respective skills of art-making and poem-crafting to mentally retarded, institutionalized individuals, to black and Hispanic children in a ghetto school, and to old, ill, depressed, uneducated people in a nursing home—with creditable results and considerable satisfaction to all concerned!
The argument of the book is stated in the opening chapter: artistic activity is universal, but our culture subverts it early on by inculcating that it is a rare gift and that its expression should square with “reality.” This misses the true significance of the artistic process, namely, that it is a way of ordering self and media, thus fostering the developmental need for mastery and personal expression therefore, not encouraging artistic activity represents an enormous loss both for the individual's growth and satisfaction and for society at large.
The argument is repeated, restated, reiterated—a deliberate redundancy that reflects my frustration that a valuable thesis is not systematically and specifically developed as it deserves. Instead, it is subverted by stylistic overkill and inflation. For example, extensive quotations and reproduced illustrations make up roughly 25% of the total book.
The author aptly refers to Dewey's “restorative” function of art, extolling “the satisfaction from transforming one's self and something in the ‘out there’ into an organized form that has individuality, a personal stamp” (p. 91). About a century before that, John Ruskin , in “The Nature of Gothic” chapter of Stones of Venice, diagnosed the then current social ills as due to the ordinary