 In line with his naturalism, Dewey is highly critical of attempts to idealize art and the aesthetic away from “the objects of concrete experience” (AE: 17), as well as of the aspiration to explain art’s value by its supposed capacity to disclose some higher forms of reality from the natural one we share with other animals. For Dewey, this kind of spiritual take on art is yet another example of the human ambition to build permanence within the constantly changing and unpredictable natural world. He traces the origins of many influential dualisms, for example between “high and low” and “material and ideal”, as well as “the contempt for the body” and “the fear of the senses”, to this more fundamental dualism between spirit and nature (AE: 26). Already in Experience and Nature, Dewey argues that there are but two alternatives, 