Dangerous Temporalities

In the epilogue of Martin Heidegger’s famous 1936 essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, he addresses how the aesthetic object’s conjectural essence — the question of ‘what it is’ — will always be bound up with how it is engaged with and consumed. Heidegger highlights the effect and implications of the relationship between a particular artwork’s aesthetic form and its reception:

Aesthetics takes the work of art as an object, the object of aisthesis, of sensuous apprehension in the wide sense. Today we call this apprehension lived experience. The way in which man experiences art is supposed to give information about its Essence.

(1993, p. 204)