Abstract This paper advances a pragmatist redefinition of what counts as art by re-articulating the relation between art and aesthetic experience. Drawing primarily—though not uncritically—on John Dewey's Art as Experience, I argue that the artistic emerges in continuity with the broader aesthetic field of experience, yet acquires a more determinate configuration within it. The argument unfolds in two movements. First, I reconstruct the pragmatist expansion of the aesthetic beyond the confines of a fixed “system of the arts” and identify three structural traits of aesthetic experience: situated expressiveness, qualitative salience, and a demand for form. I also revise Dewey's emphasis on consummatory closure by reframing aesthetic unity in terms of a demand for form rather than its necessary achievement. Second, I turn back from aesthetic experience to art and propose an adverbial and emergentist account of artistic specificity. Artistic experience is characterized not by intrinsic properties, fixed media, or ontological conditions, but by operative thresholds internal to experience: conscious undertaking, material and formal selectivity, and communicative-critical reach. The proposal is situated in dialogue with Danto, Dickie, Levinson, and Weitz, clarifying points of convergence while defending a naturalistic and non-essentialist alternative. The conclusion reinterprets the “system of the arts” as a retrospective and evaluative mapping of artistically operative practices rather than a prescriptive taxonomy.
Nicola Ramazzotto (Fri,) studied this question.