Culture as Experience from Dewey to Cavell

The expansion of art audiences and the creation of new forms, agents, and models of artistic practice have transformed the very definition of art, challenging elitist notions of "great art." Dewey's Art as Experience was essential to this transformation. This understanding and defense of an art that has not lost contact with ordinary audiences, which was film at first, extends to widespread cultural practices (internet videos, video games, TV series, popular music, etc.). They are places where artistic and hermeneutic authority is reappropriated and where agents are reempowered through the constitution of individual experiences. Yet the question of their status as art remains. My first aim here is to use Dewey's analyses in Art as Experience to assert not only the importance of popular culture in human lives but also its status as art. I shall bring together Stanley Cavell and Dewey, often seen as opposites in their approach to pragmatism, as inventors and defenders of an ordinary aesthetics; then, starting from Robert Warshow and Richard Shusterman, I propose a new theoretical inheritance of Art as Experience.