„What is characteristic of aesthetic experience is that by looking, describing, thinking, and interrogating artwork, we make ourselves new. Works of art – whether pictures or writings or dances or songs – rework the raw materials of our default organization. The engagement with an artwork is an engagement with oneself that tends to alter us, to reorganize us. This is why artworks offer something like emancipation: they free us from the ways that we happen to find ourselves, organized by habit, by culture, by history, and even by biology. This entanglement is the key to understanding our true nature. [...] This is because the aesthetic is much more widespread and abiding than even art and art-making; it is as basic and as original as the fact of consciousness itself. The aesthetic is a live possibility, an opportunity, and a problem, wherever we find ourselves. We are not fixed, stable, defined, and known; the very act of trying to bring ourselves into focus reorganizes and changes us. We are an aesthetic phenomenon.“ (Noë 2023b: 11)