My new article The Arts of Action is out now in Philosopher’s Imprint!

This article is kind of intensely personal – perhaps awkwardly so, for an academic article. I realized, while I was writing it, that it was distilling basically all this weird stuff I’ve been thinking about, obsessing over, and floundering to articulate for, like, decades. It’s about all this stuff I love that’s at the margins of Fancy Artistic Life. It’s about why I love them, and why they’ve been marginalized. It’s about “process art”.

So: most traditional arts are what I’m calling “object arts”. An artist makes a thing, you appreciate the thing. Painting, novels, theater. The thing the audience appreciates is some external, distinct object. It’s the painting that’s dramatic, thrilling, moving.

The process arts are where the artist makes a thing, and then you, the audience, interact with that thing, and then *you appreciate your own actions*. The artwork helps make *you* beautiful, or dramatic, or elegant – and helps to shape the form of your beauty. Examples include: games, the act of cooking, social tango, contact improv, rock climbing, cities, the physical movement that surrounds eating, the social life that arises around hot pots and fondues.

In technical language: in object art, the aesthetic qualities are in the artwork. In process art, the artwork calls forth the aesthetic qualities inside the activity of the audience, for the sake of the audience’s appreciation of their own actions.

I think process arts are everywhere, but we often ignore them or misunderstand them, because we’re caught in this object art paradigm. We try to turn process arts into object arts, and in so doing we often drain the life out of them. And we suppress process-art qualities in many of the traditional arts. So the point here is not to force process arts into an object art frame, but to to try to appreciate them for how they do their own thing.

This is my attempt to give a Theory of the Process Arts, and answer a lot of the basic questions. Who’s the artist – the designer of the object or the active appreciator? Why call it an art, and not just freeform everyday aesthetic appreciation? And why have the process arts been so neglected? The answers are variations on a central theme: The object arts typically concentrate aesthetic responsibility in the artist. The process arts often *distribute* them, in a complex way, between artist and audience.

And it’s an attempt to find as broad a variety of examples as I could, and be true to the practitioner’s self-descriptions of those arts. My favorite parts of this aren’t the philosophy, but all the stuff I dug up about how cooks and tango practitioners talk about the inner feeling of their practice.

(PS: the article started its life as a couple of pages in the games book about the core nugget of the idea – the object arts and the process arts – and a bunch of unanswered questions. I wrote those parts of the book 3 years ago. I then spent another couple years trying to expand the theory beyond games and answering those questions, and that’s where this article comes from. It’s much expanded and improved from the original seed in the book.)

The article is online and free and open access to all.