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For the past twenty years, the New Patrons initiative has been inspiring the creation of artworks with the complicity of the social contexts and public spaces in which they operate. The challenge is to allow citizens to commission contemporary artists for a concerted realization of an art work likely to acquire a “use value,” in resonance with civil society and the projects of general interest. As such, the New Patrons initiative offers a particularly enlightening case for understanding the intersecting values of democratic innovation and contemporary artistic creation. The artwork, in so far as it gives form to a “sensitive experience” in the sense of the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey or Walter Lippman, is considered here as one of the consequences of the implementation of the common, as the stakes of a both aesthetic and political instauration.