  Gadamer’s discussion of the relation between art and play should not be equated with any argument that art is a trivial game or pastime. He follows the precedent of Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, which contend that artworks are dramatic in that they place something in play. The underlying motif is that aesthetic consciousness is far from self-contained but is rather drawn into the play of something much larger than what is evident to subjective consciousness. The analogy with drama and, indeed, sporting events, implies that art is eventual, an occasion that consciousness surrenders to and participates in. Spectatorial participation (like much art research) demands immersion in that which cannot be fully anticipated or controlled by individual consciousness. The game and the artwork are both forms of self-movement which require that the spectator play along with what they bring into being (RB 23). Gadamer asserts the “primacy of the play” over consciousness: “the players are merely the way the play comes into presentation” (TM 92, 98). Participation takes the individual players out of themselves. The individual subject is that upon which success, satisfaction or loss is imposed from within the game. By analogy, the work of art is also “the playing of it”. An autonomous event comes into being, something comes to stand in its own right which “changes all that stand before it” (RB 25). Like the ancient theoros, the spectator not only participates in the event which is the artwork, but is potentially transformed by it (RB 24).