Art and Design Review, 2018, 6, 1-11 http://www.scirp.org/journal/adr ISSN Online: 2332-2004 ISSN Print: 2332-1997 DOI: 10.4236/adr.2018.61001 Jan. 25, 2018 1 Art and Design Review Two Opposed Models of Approaching the Relationship between Art and Society and the Proposal of “Social-Aesthetic Constructs” as a Possibility of Mediation Rodrigo Duarte Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Federal University of Minas Gerais), Belo Horizonte, Brazil Abstract The objective of this article is to investigate two opposed models of ap- proaching the relationship between art and society. The first one—that of Jacques Rancière—stresses the idea of aesthetic autonomy as a result of a his- torical process that began with Kant’s Critique of Judgement, reaching its most developed form in contemporaneity, and the second model, represented here by Richard Shusterman (inspired by John Dewey pragmatist aesthetics), focuses on the deep roots that artistic phenomena have in society and culmi- nates with his analysis of the hip hop culture. Taking into account as well their respectively fruitfulness as some of their limitations and inspired by Theodor Adorno, I propose the concept of “social-aesthetic construct”, which is meant to be a mediation between the aforementioned opposed models. Keywords Jacques Rancière, Richard Shusterman, Theodor Adorno, Autonomy of Art, Social-Aesthetic Constructs 1. Jacques Rancière and the Dialectic of Aesthetic Separation and Aesthetic Community The topic “autonomy of art”, which has been discussed since the eighteenth century—almost at the same time of the rise of aesthetics as a philosophical dis- cipline—arrived in the twentieth century to a large extent as a debate on the re- lationship between art and society. Among the many viewpoints on that rela- How to cite this paper: Duarte, R. (2018). Two Opposed Models of Approaching the Relationship between Art and Society and the Proposal of “Social-Aesthetic Con- structs” as a Possibility of Mediation. Art and Design Review, 6, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.4236/adr.2018.61001 Received: July 27, 2017 Accepted: January 22, 2018 Published: January 25, 2018 Copyright © 2018 by author and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access