Was Art as Experience socially effective? Dewey, the Federal Art project and Abstract Expressionism

The purpose of this paper is to consider a number of aspects of Dewey‘s influence on American artistic culture between the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-fifties by focusing on the social and political implications of his approach to art in terms of experience. This entails recapturing, in a concise form, the impact of Dewey’s thought on the development first of the Federal Art Project and later on Abstract Expressionism. On the basis of the pragmatist assumption that the soundness of a theoretical proposal is to be measured according to its capacity to meet the difficulties arising in our everyday interaction with our environment, the present paper systematically examines the theoretical implications of Dewey's aesthetics in the light of certain aspects and the historical consequences of a specific cultural policy. Firstly Dewey's conception of art and aesthetic experience appears to have made a decisive contribution by providing new opportunities to enjoy the arts and by widely promoting practices with the potential to be aesthetically satisfying. Dewey’s ideas actually led to an undermining of the unquestioned hierarchy between the fine arts and crafts, between popular culture and design, etc. More problematic are their connections with a cultural policy aimed at building an American cultural identity in opposition to the dominant European one. Further questions regard the emergence of a wider art market. Secondly, Dewey's influence on the Abstract Expressionists is evident in the way it shifted the artistic focus from art objects toward the experiential dimensions of artistic practices. Some problems regard the onset of a new fracture in terms of the accessibility of this kind of work for a general audience. Further difficulties are connected with a certain reinforcement of the conception of the artist as creative genius and with the related interpretation of artistic creation as extreme subjective expression.