Abstract
Aesthetic approaches to IPT are informal and non-canonical and do not normally emerge from academic conferences or journals. Museums, Biennales, and other places committed to either displaying or performing art, engage large publics and generate metaphors, visions and ideas that may add up to theoretical impact. Aesthetic approaches in IPT are not to be confused with practices of international diplomacy through art and culture, they are not about international relations pursued through other means (like cultural diplomacy or mobilizing democratic publics through art). The aesthetic dimension of IPT stresses the pursuit of goals in politics via arguments or statements made in either specific art contexts or in other informal milieus and discourses in which art is used as a vehicle for political signification, and the use of sounds, images and performances is instrumental to conveying (and ‘curating’) meanings and experience. These approaches are deemed to be integral to current, canonical developments in IPT, inasmuch as contemporary art is now helping define, through a myriad landmark actions, what is left of the public sphere.