Aqueous aesthetics : an art history of change

Abstract

This essay, the edited text of a lecture by Ross Gibson, demonstrates what its author calls an "aqueous aesthetics", and in the process calls for an art history that "records, analyses and theorises how creativity proceeds in a world that is suffused with fluidity". The structure and language of Gibson's text embodies this fluidity, as do the various objects—art works, music, literature, chance encounters, anecdotes—he incorporates as his examples. Adopting a voice at once personal and learned, Gibson proposes a mode of history writing different in kind from that usually encountered in books about art, a writing that is multidisciplinary in its range of interests and transnational in its scope.