Art and Public Life is a combination seminar-colloquium, beginning in the fall term of 2014 and continuing throughout the 2014-15 academic year. The aim of the seminar is to work through some of the most advanced thinking on ideas about publics and their relation to questions of community, politics, society, culture, and the arts. From John Dewey through Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas, the notion of the public has remained central to a wide variety of debates in the humanities and social sciences. What is a public? How are publics constituted? What is the role of real and virtual space, architectural design and technical media, in the formation of publics? And, most centrally for our purposes, what role can and do the arts play in the emergence of various kinds of publics? One of our aims is to gauge the transformations in the arts and notions of the public sphere since the great outpouring of reflections on this topic that marked the “Culture Wars” of the 1980s, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989, and the emergence of new technical media along with new virtual and actual publics since the 1990s. Central to this investigation is the emergence of new concepts of art as “social practice” and new modes of thinking about the public sphere not merely as a kind of space, but as the site of practices and actions. Over the course of the year, Art and Public Life will also bring visiting artists, critics, and scholars to the University of Chicago campus to give a series of public lectures on the topic that will be considered for publication in a special issue of Critical Inquiry on Art & Public Life.