 In contrast to much contemporary aesthetics, Gadamer takes the experience of beauty to be central to an understanding of the nature of art and in the final pages of Truth and Method, he discusses the beautiful as that which is self-evidently present to us (as ‘radiant’) exploring also the close relationship between the beautiful and the true. Of particular importance in his writing about art and literature are the three ideas that appear in the subtitle to ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful’ (1986b): art as play, symbol and festival. The role of play is a central notion in Gadamer’s hermeneutic thinking generally, providing the basis for Gadamer’s account of the experience both of art and understanding (see  Aesthetics and Subjectivism  above). The symbolic character of the artwork is seen, by Gadamer, not in terms of any form of simple ‘representationalism’, but instead in terms of the character of art as always showing something more than is literally present to us in the work (this aspect of art as referring outside itself is also taken up by Gadamer elsewhere in relation to the character of art as ‘imitation’—mimesis). The artwork, no matter what its medium, opens up, through its symbolic character, a space in which both the world, and our own being in the world, are brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality. In the experience of art, we are not merely given a ‘moment’ of vision, but are able to ‘dwell’ along with the work in a way that takes us out of ordinary time into what Gadamer calls ‘fulfilled’ or ‘autonomous’ time. Thus the artwork has a festive, as well as symbolic and playful character, since the festival similarly takes us out of ordinary time, while opening us up to the true possibility of community. Gadamer returned specifically to the question of art in his late essay (from 1992) ‘The Artwork in Word and Image: "So True, So Full of Being"’(Gadamer, 2007, pp. 192–224) in which he draws out the character of interpretation as not something additional to the work or art, but that in which the artwork is itself realized. In so doing, Gadamer also enlarges and expands the idea of interpretation that was evident in his earlier works, drawing on the experience of reading in a way that not only shows the richness of textual engagement, but also brings out the dynamic, performative, and essentially other-involving-character of all interpretation.