ABSTRACT
John Dewey's pragmatic aesthetics has been revived by Richard Shusterman. Discipline Based Art Education, for instance, identifies aesthetics as a major area of its curriculum, besides art history, studio arts, and art criticism. The significance of aesthetics for art education is furthered by its practice for dispelling the false separation between language and visual art, especially the "silent" and mute arts such as painting, sculpture, and printmaking. In the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Immanuel Kant is chastised for his inability to provide interpretative knowledge in his aesthetic theory; for Gadamer "great art" provides humankind with moral insight. Struggling against the reduction of the judgment of taste to that of sensuousness, as in the empiricist haute bourgeois tradition where free play of the imagination ended in hedonism, Kant attempted to reconcile aesthetic experience as the free play of the mind between understanding and the imagination. The mass media have rendered the supplemental function of art to alienation problematic.
