Hegel was writing in a time of intense development of ideas about the arts. Kant had treated aesthetic experience largely in relation to the experience of the beauty of nature, but for Hegel aesthetics becomes primarily about art. The reason for this is simple: art is an objective medium in which a community collectively reflects upon itself, and the art of historical peoples is to be understood as the attempt to bring before the consciousnesses of its members the totality of what is. It is as art that “consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape” (PM: §556). The peculiarity of art lie in the sensuousness of the medium in which its content is objectified.