ABSTRACT
A neglected aspect of the theory and research on the public sphere is the aesthetic public sphere, or aesthetic public culture. Unlike other social and cultural institutions such as ‘the church’ (religion), ‘the school’ (education) or ‘the community centre’ (the local) that have been widely explored as sites of identity formation and discursive practice, the arts have received little attention from this angle. This is probably because culture and the arts – whether with ‘high-brow’ or ‘low-brow’ connotations – are still considered primarily as depictions of social reality. The recognition that they are autonomous social fields is long established in cultural sociology but not as yet in democratic studies. If, however, following Chaney (2002: 163), we acknowledge that ‘cultural objects of performance are shifting from functioning as representations or depictions of social life to constituting the contexts or terms of everyday life’, their exploration as public spaces and constituent elements of the democratic public sphere becomes imperative.
