“Beshty’s deep exploration is a compelling addition to the study of aesthetics.  By grounding the idea in the material properties of the moment, the book takes us to new territories of thought on the subject. We go beyond aesthetics as a formal language to a place of origins where we pay attention to all that happens around us, from sense experience to the domain of ideas and objects.  This beautifully written and disciplined investigation adds depth and nuance to a subject central to artists and theorists, especially those who desire a more culturally driven idea of aesthetics.”

Charles Gaines, artist

 “This remarkable book offers a contemporary artist’s take on aesthetics as multivarious, universal sensory responsiveness. Beginning with the experience of reading this book itself as an aesthetic experience, Beshty generates a welcoming, engaging energy that expands as the book and its subject matter unfolds around you. Piling insight upon insight, all expressed with admirable clarity, Beshty grounds aesthetics as a practice of communality, the quality most needed by all living beings on the planet right now.”

Terry Smith, author of "Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art"

“Beshty’s Worlds of Appearance acts as a compendium or encyclopedia, one that is produced by a daily activity of work and the interpersonal relationships that develop out of it, the project’s primary locus is the book, rather than an external object or exhibition. Beshty shows us there is a question in photography and in art in general that is easy to overlook, how reproductions extend the life of the objects that they depict. The work of art extends through its reproduction; it occupies its reproduction, flows through it. Worlds of Appearance is designed to circulate, to move through boundaries that art objects cannot. They can be slipped into a pocket, taken on trip, and yet, they are also a world within the world, a microcosmic reality.”

Hans Ulrich Obrist, author of "Life in Progress"

“Part phenomenology, part media theory, part manifesto, Beshty’s study reveals that aesthetics, far from being a decorative afterthought, is the very ground of politics and collective life. It is a work both to learn from and to delight in.”

Alexander Alberro, author of "Interstices: Negotiations at Contemporary Art's Boundaries"

“In the opening pages of Worlds of Appearance, Beshty describes his book alternately as a practical guide to aesthetics and a manual. It is both but it is also a manifesto that argues for aesthetic literacy as fundamental to contemporary life. Working out from the conditions of experience instead of an exemplary object, Beshty refuses to take aesthetics as an abstract philosophical problem or an art-specific discourse—instead fighting for its significance as a material practice organizing what can be sensed and communicated as well as imagined. What results is a rare book that generously models how to use its own ideas, and in so doing, extends to its readers-become-users the possibility to differently embody them.”

Suzanne Hudson, author of "Contemporary Painting"

“I have no use for treatises on aesthetics. But this is different. Beshty has produced a manifesto-text on vision and perception the likes of which we have not seen since the age of modernism.”

George Baker, author of "Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography"