In 1967, the American artist Bruce Nauman presented a neon piece with the text “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” For years, I dismissed the piece as modernist rubbish, hippy fluff, or pathetic romanticism—and perhaps, in part, I still do, especially the beginning. However, the ending—particularly the word “mystic”—has required reconsideration.

Deleuze and Guattari propose in their final collaborative work, What is Philosophy?, that the responsibility of the artist is to produce the possibility of new experiences. Here, “new,” in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari’s obsessive precision, should be understood not in the sense of a new day or a new iPhone, but as New—that is, new not in degree but in kind. This implies not merely a new experience, but an experience of a different kind. In this talk, I will address the implications this “different-in-kind new” poses for the assumed stability of the subject in relation to aesthetic production and judgment. Siding with Deleuze and Guattari, I argue for the necessity of reconsidering art’s presumed social and relational values, as well as well-worn proverbs like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This shift challenges the traditional locus of art’s transformative potential, favoring an understanding of aesthetic experience as contingent and empty, thus dissolving commensurable identity formations.

At the same time, however, I will argue that Deleuze and Guattari provide compelling reasons to defend a non-reactive autonomy of aesthetic production and judgment—and, with it, a defense of Nauman’s mystic truth.