Abstract

This paper explores the possibility that John Dewey’s metaphorical redefinition of art as experience can help reclaim the concept of “experience” for cultural leadership. Far from being a promoter of the consumable experiences in the “experience economy”, Dewey’s leader is an energetic educator and a critic of the institutionalization of art and the aesthetical. Seeing art as an active process of doing and undergoing, Dewey is concerned with the problem of isolated high culture and his aim is to change the elitist and market-transactional conception of art and open up the conventional discourse, something he dubbed “the museum conception of art”. The museum conception of art entails creating a view of fine art as objects to be served, consumed, stored away and appreciated in a safe environment, preferably secured in a glass box, at a location which people must obtain permission to enter. This model, which still prevails, also applies in the theatre and the concert hall, where important works of art are segregated from ordinary people and everyday life. Dewey’s idea of art as experience should not, however, be interpreted in an overly managerial, limiting or regulating manner, and to develop the discourse it is helpful to look beyond its supposed essentialism. For that purpose, the metaphor of “art as experience” is best understood as an instrument of imagination, a tool, for rethinking institutions. Rather than being a formula or a set of instructions, Dewey’s critical culture-political approach provokes questions about the role of institutions, knowledge processes and power structures, and emphasises the centrality of labor in the process of reflection.