Aesthetics of Affect/Simon O'Sullivan

This is art's function: to switch our intensive register, to reconnect us with the world. Art opens us up to the non-human universe that we are part of. Indeed, art might well have a representational function (after all, art objects, like everything else, can be read) but art also operates as a fissure in representation. And we, as spectators, as representational creatures, are involved in a dance with art, a dance in which - through careful manoeuvres - the molecular is opened up, the aesthetic is activated, and art does what is its chief modus operandi: it transforms, if only for a moment, our sense of our "selves" and our notion of our world.

Simon O' Sullivan, Aesthetics of Affect, 128

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