Significant changes within the field of art itself invite us – as art researchers – to move focus from objects of art to artistic practices – from the work of art as a noun to the work of art as a verb – and to learn to think with rather than about artistic and aesthetic practice. This, I think, is also connected to a development in contemporary research in general that no longer recognizes the stricture of an informing discipline and has moved on from what Irit Rogoff has called working from inherited knowledges to working from contemporary conditions, that calls for interdisciplinarity, experimentation, collaboration across fields and forms of knowledge, a coming to terms with the situatedness of any knowledge, as well as a decolonization of the knowledge forms and norms we have inherited from Western modernity, a decentering of the human being as privileged, self-sufficient agent in the world, and the development of what Achille Mbembe calls a planetary consciousness.

Aesthetics concerns sensuous cognition (initially defined by Baumgarten as cognitio sensitiva), of living bodies in specific temporal and spatial conditions. Sensuous cognition is characterised by a certain reflexivity with regard to the sense we make of phenomena given to our senses and perception – in Kant’s work, the reflective judgment of taste is the capacity to find a concept that corresponds to a given phenomenon for which we do not have an immediate concept, in contrast to determinative judgment, where the phenomenon is immediately subsumed under an already-given concept. Thus, fundamentally, aesthetics concerns situated sensing and reflective processes of sense-making, but these activities or practices are not necessarily confined to individual human subjects confronted with discrete, delimited objects (as is the case in Baumgartian and Kantian aesthetics, roughly stated). Often, they operate collectively, and in constellations (see assemblages) or entanglements that comprise human as well as more-than-human actants. Aesthetics pertains to the ability to perceive and to be concerned,^[1]1See Bruno Latour’s concept of “from matter of fact to matter of concern”, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public”, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM exhibition catalogue edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 4–31 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). and what qualifies a practice as aesthetic is an exploration of the modes and the means by which reality is sensed and perceived and presented publicly, as part of, or at odds with, society’s common sense.^[2]2See Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 94–95. An aesthetic practice becomes artistic when this exploration is intensified and socialised. Thus, artistic aesthetic practice is not only a particular way of engaging with the sensuous world, but also involves the production of aesthetic reflective perception. In artistic practice the production of aesthetic perception is addressed to a public. In this sense, an artistic aesthetic practice proper involves the invitation of an audience, a public, to take part in the process of sensing and sense-making. It exhibits – holds out – the world and initiates a negotiation of how that which passes as reality should be perceived, and what sense to make of it (see exhibition). In line with this, Nora Sternfeld recently remarked that in today’s neoliberal society, we lose any feeling of estrangement, verfremdung.^[3]3Sternfeld made this remark on 2 April 2024, during an assessment meeting regarding the PhD thesis, Where the Present Begins to Appear as Past: Mediating Contemporaneity in a Museum of the Future by Anders Thrue Djurslev, CRAPCC at Aarhus University. Aesthetics may help us create distance to what is, to the distribution of the sensible, to become able to critically negotiate it (see reflexive transformation).