"The idea of art and the aesthetic as a separate real distinguished by its freedom, imagination, and pleasure has as its underlying correlative the dismal assumption that ordinary life is necessarily one of joyless, unimaginative coercion. This provides an excuse to the powers and institutions that structure our everyday life to be brutally indifferent to natural human needs for the pleasures of beauty and imaginative freedom. These are not to be sought in real life, but in art, whose contrast and escape from the real gives us human sufferers temporary solace and relief."
Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living beauty, Rethinking Art, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 19-20.
Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living beauty, Rethinking Art, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 19-20.