 Gadamer’s aesthetics fosters an attentiveness towards the mystery of the given and its unexpected folds of meaningfulness. Gadamer’s arguments are varied, ushering the reader towards an aesthetic attentiveness rather than making iconoclastic declarations about what the aesthetic is. They embrace close readings of the poets Rilke and Celan as well as broad strategic manoeuvres which defend the cognitive status of aesthetic and hermeneutical judgements. Hermeneutics (the art and discipline of interpretation), of which Gadamer is one of the twentieth century’s most formidable exponents, is deeply involved in philosophical disputes over the legitimacy of claims to understanding in the visual and literary arts. It does not oppose “scientific” modes of knowledge but resists their cultural privileging. For Gadamer aesthetics stands on experientially accumulative modes of learning (Bildung) which orientate and ground sound judgement in the arts. Conversation and its unpredictable turns is, appropriately, a central thread within hermeneutical aesthetics. A late exchange between Carsten Dutt and Gadamer (Dutt 1993, 61–67) offers a gentle point of entry into how philosophical hermeneutics approaches art and aesthetic experience.