Perception and the Essay of Criticism
December 15, 2025 | by Eric Bayless-Hall
Dewey was right about one thing, at least. Seeing (or hearing, etc.) a work of art one is not merely passive. Just as the artist’s work wasn’t pure activity, but was, instead, punctuated by periods of seeing what’s just been done, so the viewer is not merely receiving the work in front of her, but engaged in actively recreating it: coming to see the connections between points or marks or themes or thoughts that the work of art is made of. We don’t need to buy a philosopher’s first principles and last conclusions to borrow the wisdom that washes up between them. And ordinary Dewey is wiser than most—enough to see a distinction worth making for all your gold: recognition is not perception.
Forget, for once and for a while, your pet theory of recognition, and consider the sense this makes: we recognize what we know well enough for a purpose; whereas we begin to perceive when we haven’t yet finished learning what we’re looking at.
Recognition is, on this view, a toolbox of types by which we fit a manifold world into familiar forms—classify quickly threats and objects of desire and the means to avoid and pursue them. We recognize, roughly, the things we have easy words for—this or that as this or that sort of thing; a pear, a panther, a painting, Paul Newman. However we came to see the world in the first place, the fact is, we find ourselves here, having started, and our seeing of things is always and irreducibly a seeing-cum-understanding—that is, we recognize more or less when we look. But the miracle of perception is—and it is, indeed, a miracle, for it seems, not only unexplained, but unexplainable without begging the question—that looking with attention actually discovers more than it originally recognized. That we recognize the world is remarkable; that it continues to reveal itself to attention is more remarkable still. This discovery of what’s in front of you by means of attention is what Dewey calls perception, and that it takes the form of modifying what we first thought we saw is what he means in saying recognition, though it is not yet perception, is the beginning of perception.
Perceiving is a name for the work of seeing something unique, something that cannot be classed without sacrificing something of its distinctive character. Looking—really looking—which is as much an activity of the mind as the eye—reveals, remarkable as it continues to sound, this thing we’re attending to to be more and often other than we thought at first blush. Our initial recognition is developed, by an activity involving language as originally as color, into a more intimate familiarity with this particular thing. The more one looks, the more peculiar the thing under inspection becomes; and the more peculiarities one comes to find definitive of what this thing is, the more one will insist on the insufficiency of what we’re calling recognition: that you have to see, really see it.
Whatever else we come to view as particulars—people, for instance, and the things we love—works of art can almost be defined as those human products whose particularity we insist on in our meaningful dealings with one another. Recognition doesn’t begin to account for our interest in them; nothing said about a work will be relevant until it springs from (what we’re calling here) perception.
With these notions in hand it should be needless to say that the critic of art ought to perceive the work they write about—really see it. It will be equally obvious, however, that much of what passes for criticism is but the rehearsal of what is recognized. Critics, if there are any, are hardly more insightful on the whole than the tourist eager to announce before his tour guide tells him that that, in fact, is a Rothko they’re approaching. If you’ve had one Rothko pointed out to you, you can recognize them all as belonging to this type; but this patron, like the critic who associates in front of a painting without discovering these connections in the work under consideration, exhibits the perceptive powers of the man who catcalls legs from his car. What has actually been seen?
And why is anyone supposed to care? Why write—and why read—art criticism that doesn’t do the work, first, of seeing what it’s pointing to, and second, of communicating it coherently? Here I’ll just report a hypothesis I’ve harbored for some time and say: serious looking will express itself in serious writing. My proof? The pudding. Try conveying a perception (in our sense here) in easy words and see if you don’t find yourself walking a thin ridge between the stodgy and the inane. Slipping into either you will know yourself to betray the sense you hope to express. If perception requires work, then this goes doubly for the writing of what’s perceived. One wonders how critics, supposedly devoted to the power of art, forget when they face the page that they face a form of the same problem as the artist.
Now these two requirements, as I see them, for a critic—that they work really to see what they criticize and that they work really to write it—grow out of the basic nature of the undertaking: writing about works one’s encountered; and says about this undertaking only: strive to do it well or not at all. It should not be taken to deny, however, that writing about art well can take many forms, nor that critics, like artists, like humans, fall short on occasion. It is to say, rather, that criticism is to be an essay of one’s sense: an attempt to convey the reality one perceives as one perceives it, and this will involve criticizing oneself and one’s sense as much as the work one’s work is about.
About the Author:
Eric Bayless-Hall teaches and studies in New York. His writing appears in The Revenant Quarterly.