It's A Sunday Thing: Juan Gris (Anything But Grey)

Fig. 1. Pears and Grapes on a Table, 1913

Fig. 2. Teacups, 1914

Fig. 3. Fantomas (Pipe and Newspaper), 1915

Fig. 4. Guitar and Score, 1915

Fig. 5. Still Life, 1915-16

Fig. 6. Still Life with Flask of Bordeaux, 1919

Fig. 7. Guitar and Clarinet, 1920

Fig. 8. The Mountain (Le Canigou), 1921

Fig. 9. The Open Window, 1921

Fig. 10. Guitar and Music Paper, 1926

'In aesthetics, as in all areas of philosophy, one can begin almost anywhere - with the objects of nature or the objects of art; with aesthetic production or reception; with aesthetic judgement or artistic imagination; with concepts of things or concepts of signs; with the existential, cognitive, or ethical meaning of aesthetic states. However one begins aesthetics, the important thing is to consider the interrelatedness of these and other phenomena. This also applies when when we are concerned predominantly with special phenomena - that is, in aesthetics, with literature or film, ornament or design, monochrome painting or minimal music. One type of aesthetic object enjoys its distinctiveness only in relation to other types, against which it stands out, to which it is related, with which it is in a process of exchange. Ultimately, this holds even for every individual aesthetic object - for this landscape, this building, this installation. Each enjoys its particularity in contrast to other (types of) objects. Theory can support this particularity (and thereby fulfil its most important task) only if it shows in what more general relations this particularity is located. It is only together with a sense of the general that the sense of the particular is there; only together with a concept of this general that it is possible to have an understanding of the multiplicity of aesthetic objects and opportunities. No matter how one begins aesthetics, what always matters in the end is to have a sense of the richness of aesthetic states.'

Martin Seel

Four Blind Ears: Or, The Art Of Listening To Pictures

Fig. 1. Alessandra Sanguinetti - Time Flies (2005)


'What the picture tells me is "itself" - I should like to say. That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its forms and colours.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

From The Legible To The Sensible

Fig. 1. Suzanne Opton - Soldier: Claxton, 120 days in Afghanistan, Fort Drum, NY, 2005, 2005


'The aesthetic regime of the arts stands in contrast with the representative regime. I call this regime aesthetic because the identification of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of looking and making, but it is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products. The word aesthetics does not refer to a theory of sensibility, taste, and pleasure for art amateurs. It strictly refers to the specific mode of the being of objects of art. In the aesthetic regime, artistic phenomena are identified by their adherence to a specific regime of the sensible, which is extricated from its ordinary connections and is inhabited by a heterogeneous power, a power of a form of thought that has become foreign to itself: a product identical with something not produced, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, logos identical with pathos, the intention of the unintentional, etc.'

Jacques Rancière (The Distribution of the Sensible)