 Thus, the main question AE poses is: How did a chasm arise between the arts, artists and ordinary people? How have cultural conditions and aesthetic theories (reinforced by institutions) isolated “art and its appreciation by placing them in a realm of their own, disconnected from other modes of experiencing”? (AE, LW10: 16) AE makes explicit art’s natural continuities with everyday life, while seeking to prevent its reduction to mere entertainment or “transient pleasurable  excitations”[54]  (AE, LW10: 16). Dewey criticizes traditional aesthetics’ spectatorial (or theoretical) starting point and goes on to offer radically empirical accounts of art making, appreciation, expression, form, and criticism. Because aesthetic experience has organic roots, it can be recognized even in everyday objects and  events.[55]  Again, the goal is to dissolve the dualisms between “fine” and “useful” objects and to help establish a greater “continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living” (AE, LW10: 16).