Aesthetic Pleasure

The Regarded

The response to arrangement itself. Proportion, interval, colour relation, with no story attached and nothing being claimed. Aesthetic pleasure is the part of looking that survives after the subject has been identified and set aside.

The word

From the Greek aisthesis, sense perception, the same root that gives anaesthetic, without sensation. The philosopher Alexander Baumgarten pressed the word into service in the eighteenth century for a science of sensory knowledge, and Kant fixed beauty at its centre. The word remembers what the feeling is: perception itself, enjoyed.

The feeling

A quiet click of rightness in front of arrangement: interval, proportion, one colour against another. It asks for nothing; nothing is desired, envied or mourned, which gives the state its unusual cleanness. Attention rests on the surface without needing to pass through it to a story. It ends without loss when the looking ends.

Against its neighbours

Admiration credits a maker and ranks an achievement; aesthetic pleasure needs no author at all, and works on driftwood as well as on paintings. Entrancement will not let the eye go; aesthetic pleasure lets go easily, which is exactly why it can be revisited without cost.

In the work

Composition placed above subject. The piece reads as an arrangement first, and whatever it depicts arrives second.

Aesthetic Pleasure is held in the archive. These prints carry its family.

Open editions from $75. Free US shipping.

1 work composed with Aesthetic Pleasure

  • Angels In the Outfield SCARCE, 10 editions. Open the tier key.
    $96SOLD
    • Jo2
    • Pc2
    • Ae

    Angels In the Outfield

Composed with

The rest of the Liminal family

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