The Art Museum as an Agency of Culture

OpenAlex · İngilizce

John Dewey is probably greatest philosopher that America has produced, and his book Art as Experience perhaps most significant treatise on aesthetics to come out of American twentieth century. Yet in first few pages of this book Dewey has seen fit to begin his argument with a sharp, direct, and sustained attack upon institution of modern museum and exhibition gallery. Dewey, of course, wants to restore continuity between those refined and recondite objects that are works of art and everyday experiences with which they were originally associated. He deplores acts of collection and segregation by which they are removed from their original place in ongoing life of society. He is alarmed at remoteness which they enjoy by being taken from their original habitat and placed in a special repository. He rejects rationale by which they are separated from their original role as agents of general cultivation and civic enhancement. It is clear that Dewey is upset by those forces that have glorified fine by setting it upon a far-off pedestal and that his argument is against aesthetic abstraction, estrangement, artificiality. But as argument proceeds, it becomes clear that a social critique is also under way and that, without explicit acknowledgment, Dewey's strictures have been profoundly influenced by Thorstein Veblen and his great classic, The Theory of Leisure Class. And this causes him to search out some of historic reasons for rise of the compartmental conception of fine art and to