 Gadamer insists that a picture or image that is worthy of being called a work of art, has the power to affect us immediately. (GW 8, 374). Art addresses us. The claim that a work of art “says something to someone” (Palmer 2001, 70) alludes to the surprise, shock and, sometimes, dismay at being directly affected by what is in a work and of being forced to reflect on its claim so that it becomes more understandable to both oneself and others. Gadamer argues that “the experience of art is an experience of meaning, and as such this experience is something that is brought about by understanding” (Palmer 2001, 70).  To this extent, then, “aesthetics is absorbed into hermeneutics” (Palmer 2001, 76). This distances Gadamer from more conventional justifications of the aesthetic as offering a special kind of pleasure. The essay The Relevance of the Beautiful suggests that “the mere onlooker who indulges in aesthetic or cultural enjoyment from a safe distance, whether in the theatre, the concert hall, or the seclusion of solitary reading, simply does not exist” (RB 130). A person who takes himself to be such an onlooker, misunderstands himself. “Aesthetic self-understanding is indulging in escapism if it regards the encounter with the work of art as nothing but enchantment in the sense of liberation from the pressures of reality, through the enjoyment of a spurious freedom” (RB 130). These remarks divorce Gadamer’s thinking from Dilthey’s Erlebniss-Ästhetik in which artworks are proclaimed the site of intense but momentary experience enjoyed for their own sake independent of their cognitive content. The hedonistic personalisation of aesthetic response has two alienating consequences. On the one hand, the judgement that aesthetic experience is purely subjective severs the individual from communal networks of meaning capable of illuminating personal experience from the perspective of what is socially shared. On the other, attempts to render subjective experience academically legitimate by presenting it as a social product further estrange the individual from his experience, by translating it into third-person terms he or she may not endorse or recognise: individual experiences of beauty can suddenly become embodiments of class prejudice. In contrast to Dilthey (1833–1911), Gadamer defends an Erfahrungs-Ästhetik which claims that like significant life-experiences, our relationships with artworks are deep and ongoing: we revisit them and in doing so understanding is continually renegotiated. Gadamer speaks of the “interminability” of such experience (die Unabschliessbarkeit aller Erfahrung, Palmer 2001, 66). It is forever open because of its cognitive movement. The cumulative nature of such experience is an instance of Bildung (formation and learning through experience) and is, as such, a living process of becoming (Werden).