Worlds of Appearance

An accessible primer on aesthetics in art and everyday life, written by artist and scholar Walead Beshty. 

In this general guide to the foundations of aesthetics, Walead Beshty introduces the complexities of aesthetics through succinct language and real-world examples, presenting an introductory theory of how the world becomes known to us through our senses and how that knowledge in turn builds our experience of everything around us.

Considering aesthetics on both a practical and a theoretical level, Worlds of Appearance asserts that art and aesthetics are inherently political, composing a fundamental form of communication and a means by which we can imagine the very nature of what can be experienced, sensed, and expressed. Aesthetics, argues Beshty, is a corporeal and material area of study, one that reveals how we perceive the world and how we develop technologies in response. With this book, he aims to fill a gap in existing writing about aesthetics, offering a clear explanation of how it acts as a dynamic force in our daily lives, how it functions on a concrete level, and how we can understand its possibilities.

Beginning with how we transform a flood of sensations into a coherent perception of the world, the book considers the basics of aesthetic production and reception, then moves on to look at specific examples of aesthetics in practice, with a focus on art, architecture, and performance. It concludes by laying out how aesthetic literacy is key to understanding the production of wide-ranging aspects of our lives, including digitization, mass media, systems of communications, and power relations.

Walead Beshty is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. Over the past twenty-five years, he has held academic positions at several universities and has had solo museum exhibitions at Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland; Barbican Centre, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and MoMA / P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; among others. His artwork is held in collections including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate, London. A book of his collected writings, 33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters: Selected Writings (2003–2015), was published in 2016.