For art to exist, it is not enough to have painters or musicians, dancers or actors. For there to be aesthetic experience, it is not enough for us to find pleasure in seeing or hearing them. For art to exist, there needs to be a gaze and a thought that identify it. Aesthetics is the name of a specific regime for identifying art. Yesterday, aesthetics was accused of concealing the cultural games of social distinction. Today, there is a desire to free artistic practices from their parasitic discourse. But aesthetics is not a discourse; it is a historical regime for identifying art. This regime is paradoxical, as it establishes the autonomy of art while simultaneously dissolving its boundaries with the objects of everyday life. In this unresolved tension of two politics lies aesthetics.