Walking and Breathing

A major criticism of Dewey's account of art seems to be it's openness; one could take his definition of a art and apply it to almost anything done in life, perhaps even living itself. This recieve so much criticism because it seems ridiculous to consider wuch things as walking or sitting or breathing as 'art' merely because they were done with conscious intent. However, it has also been noted previously that people have a tendency to dismiss a peice of artwork because we feel that "even I could do that." Perhaps the idea of breathing or walking as art seems so ridiculous because we all do it, and so we degrade it. But really, what if we did include conscious intention into those activities? When do we ever become conscious of how we walk or breathe? Walking, though it seems to simple because "we can all do it" is actually an incredibly complex activity. To quote an article in National Geographic, "These biometrichal windows on walking and running illuminate just how astonishing a feat of balance, coordination, and efficiency is upright locomotion. The legs on a walking human body act not unlike inverted pendulums. Using a stiff leg as a point of support, the body swings up and over it in an arc, so that the potential energy gained in the rise roughly equals the kinetic energy gnerated in the descent. By this trick the body stores and recovers so much of the energy used with each stride that it reduces it's own workload by as much as 65 percent" (Ackerman, J. "The Downside of Upright." National Geographic July 2006: 126-145). True, complexity does not give something art-status, but it seems that we could view walking differently if we walked with conscious intent.

I have no specifc question for this entry. Instead I am interested in a response to the validity of these thoughts.