Shannon and Weaver. No attention is paid to the subjects involved in this communication process, to the context in which it takes place, or to the semantic content. By ascribing importance merely to those properties which are accessible and quantifiable, information aesthetics limits itself to syntactic structures, with the result that the information is confined to a very reduced range. The attempt to find an aesthetic ‹measure› for evaluations immanent to the work of art and independent of reception and context, and therefore resting solely on the information content of aesthetic communication, can be viewed as a failure. For that reason, a different understanding of communication is required that can be applied to the area of aesthetics. If the aesthetic is brought into connection with the area of communication, then this means in other words that aesthetics is understood to be a processual category of the social system. Accordingly, such an ‹aesthetics as communicative process› would be at home not in the theory of Shannon or of cybernetics, but rather in system theory and Constructivism. However, in order to get close to the subject of aesthetics the

relationship between ‹communication› and ‹art› must first be conceptually harmonized. And this is all the more necessary in view of the evidently large number of various meanings of either concept.