[ Please click the links above for video and additional documents for each session ]
An Open Seminar on Aesthetics
with Walead Beshty
The Brick, 518 N. Western Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90004
Sundays, 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm, 13 September – 4 October 2026
Artist and theorist Walead Beshty leads a series of four seminars organized around his forthcoming book, Worlds of Appearance: An Introduction to Aesthetics in Practice (University of Chicago Press, November 2026), exploring the foundations of aesthetics and its possibilities.
This series is both a primer on aesthetics and an open forum to explore aesthetics as a set of practical concepts; in short, it is a forum to communicate about communing. The first two sessions will focus on how common aesthetic forms work (so-called instrumental or vernacular aesthetics), how they appear to us, how we sense them, how they inform us, and how they situate us in the world. The next session will move on to reflexive aesthetics, including the “special” case of the arts, and explore how art and artistic thought turns the familiar strange and makes us aware of how perception (the grasping or understanding of our world through our senses) works. The final session will discuss various artistic strategies and emergent phenomena, essentially how the unknown or unsensed first makes its appearance, and how we can be sensitive to and take notice of these emergences.
This seminar is about what can happen if we attune ourselves to how sensations are transmitted to us and how we pass them on, how we build our world from those sensations and how we can bring new worlds into existence out of the fissures that have opened up in the old ones. As Beshty writes in the preface to Worlds of Appearance:
The world arrives as sensation. Before we have concepts, before we have words, before we have things, we have sensation. Within this flood of sensation, we begin to perceive patterns, and from these patterns our world takes shape. We share the patterns that are useful, sending them out into the world where they are adopted and modified by others and circulated again. This sharing of patterns brings us together, allowing us to inhabit a reality held in common. This process is aesthetics, from the Greek αἴσθησῐς (aísthēsĭs), meaning “knowledge gained through the senses”; that is, aesthetics is a corporeal form of knowledge embodied in our behaviors and the things we make. Understanding aesthetics is understanding the means by which we share ideas and experiences, and how we not only establish community through this sharing but form a common mind.