This paper tries to understand the constitutive relationship between art as a social activity and human life. It focuses on three points: the making of artworks, the experiencing of artworks and the form of life which mediates between creation and reception. My paper is interested more specifically in the transition from modernism to contemporary art. First Ⅰ try to distinguish between the general constraints defining art as a way of making and the specific interpretation of this way of making by modernism. The modernist interpretation stressed the autonomy of art and, at the same time, its polemic attitude towards common life. During the transition from modernism to contemporary art this interpretation rapidly lost ground in artistic practice but it still haunts much of our theories. To render them relevant to contemporary art we have to redefine the relationship between art and everyday life: art is nowadays itself a part of the reality it uses as its material or object. One of the consequences of this shift in the social functioning of art is the rediscovery of aesthetic experience as a privileged way of experiencing artworks. My paper ends by a tentative analysis of the constitutive properties of aesthetic experience. Ⅰ try to show that when art is experienced aesthetically it is not cut off from real life because the cognitive relationship and the search of a sensible-intellectual satisfaction elicited by this cognitive activity are two basic ways for human beings to relate to reality.