Image: Museo d'Arte Sacra di Scaria, Chicago
Walead Beshty will lead a free, four-part public seminar in Los Angeles this September and October ahead of the publication of his forthcoming book, ‘Worlds of Appearance: An Introduction to Aesthetics in Practice’. The series, hosted at The Brick, will examine aesthetics as both a field of theory and a practical means of understanding perception, communication and shared experience.
The seminars are scheduled for Sundays from 2 to 5pm on September 13, September 20, September 27 and October 4 at The Brick, 518 N Western Avenue. The event is free and open to the public, although registration is required. Each session will address a distinct theme, moving from the circulation of sensation and the aesthetic commons to the body, artistic strategies, and emergent forms.
The opening session, ‘Communion and Sensation: The Circulation of Experience and the Aesthetic Commons’, will consider how aesthetic forms operate in common life. The second, ‘The Body and Its Projections (Objects, Things, and Tools)’, will focus on the relationship between bodies and the objects that extend or mediate them. The programme then turns to art with ‘Reflexive Aesthetics: Art and its Strategies’, before concluding with ‘Emergencies: On Information, Noise, and Emergent Forms’.
According to the event description, the series is intended as both an introductory course and an open forum. Its first two sessions will explore instrumental or vernacular aesthetics—how ordinary forms appear, inform perception and situate people in the world. The third will examine how art can make the familiar strange and draw attention to the workings of perception. The final session will address how unknown or previously unsensed phenomena first become perceptible.
Beshty’s book is scheduled for publication by the University of Chicago Press on November 9, 2026. The publisher describes it as an accessible primer on aesthetics in art and everyday life, beginning with the transformation of sensation into coherent perception before considering aesthetic production and reception. Later chapters address art, architecture and performance, as well as digitization, mass media, communication systems and power relations.
The book presents aesthetics as a corporeal and material form of knowledge, and argues that art and aesthetics are inherently political because they shape communication and the limits of what can be experienced, sensed and expressed. In a preface excerpt included with the seminar announcement, Beshty writes that “the world arrives as sensation” and describes the sharing and modification of useful patterns as a process through which people inhabit a common reality.
Beshty is described in the announcement as an artist, writer, curator and educator based in Los Angeles. His solo museum exhibitions have included presentations at Kunst Museum Winterthur, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Hammer Museum and MoMA PS1. His selected writings were published in 2016 as ‘33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters: Selected Writings (2003–2015)’. The seminar will take place at The Brick, a Los Angeles space for contemporary art and ideas, on the four listed Sundays.
