changing social actuality and to regard the making of works of art as a model
of a process of free meaning-making in which we might all hope to partici-
pate more fully.^68 It is reasonable to hope that artists might, as Wordsworth
put it,“create the taste by which [they are] to be enjoyed”^69 and in doing so
move us toward fuller forms of human community in significant meaning-
making. Yet if we insist that this is the central function of art, we risk
missing both how much fun“lower”forms of art can be and how efforts at
artistic meaning-making might also be politically one-sided. If we insist that
art directly confront our antagonized social actuality and the traumas that it
produces, then we might avoid these risks, but fall instead into tendentious-
ness, in the form of either socialist realism (boy-meets-tractor stories, or
Horatio Alger stories, or voyages of self-discovery of oneself“as an x”)or
empty sneering and provocativeness. It seems reasonable and important to
enjoy the activities of writing, painting, composing, choreographing, and so
on, but if we write, paint, compose, or choreograph simply to have fun, then
we run the risk of failing to think about social actuality and subjective
aspiration in the deep way that the making of art can sometimes embody.
Dewey seconds these thoughts in acknowledging that we live in an imper-
fect society and that in an imperfect society artistic making that is aimed at
aesthetic affirmation will inevitably and appropriately be surrounded by
escapist entertainment (and, we can add, politicized art and theory) as its
natural penumbrae.
In an imperfect society–and no society will ever be perfect–fine art will be to
some extent an escape from, or an adventitious decoration of, the main
activities of living. But in a better ordered society than that in which we live,
an infinitely greater happiness than is now the case would attend all modes of
production. We live in a world in which there is an immense amount of
organization, but it is an external organization, not one of the ordering of a
growing experience, one that involves, moreover, the whole of the live
creature, toward a fulfilling conclusion. Works of art that are not remote from
common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unified(^68) The best accounts of artistic making as a model for the cultivation of subjectivity as such
in situare Kant’s theory of genius (see Chapter 5 above) and Charles Altieri’s work on
artistic making in hisSubjective Agency(Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
(^69) Wordsworth,“Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815),”inSelected Poems and Prefaces,
ed. Stillinger, p. 477.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 273