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Populär Culture Review
scan from top to bottom, we can even see Madame Cezanne stand up from her
seat to greet us! Performance is thus key to painting itself, and whether the body
is thrown and the eye scans a soup can, a starry night sky, a man wearing a
derby with an apple obscuring his face, or a series of melting clocks, it is always
the case that we perform the work of art. Cezanne just knows this, makes use of
it, and creates masterpieces like no other.
An aesthetic object is not exhausted by our experience of it, it does not
represent something other than what it is, and it must be performed. What
remains to be said is how the performance of an aesthetic object is particularly a
performative expression. “Expression,” here, is not meant to suggest that
aesthetics is merely