The debate between so- called formalists, who are interested in the inner mechanics of visual, literary and sonic objects, and so- called historicists, who see art through the lens of ideology, discourse and society, has well and truly run out of steam. As I have argued elsewhere (de la Fuente 2007; 2010a; 2010b; 2015), there has recently been a renewed emphasis on the ‘agencies’ or ‘affordances’ of art (Acord and DeNora 2008; Gell 1998), on the materiality of aesthetic practices (Mukerji 1983), the kinds of passions engendered by art forms (Benzecry 2011; Hennion 2005), and even grudging recognition that social scientists interested in aesthetic matters may have something to learn from art historians and psychologists of art (Tanner 2004). If I had to nominate one prevalent characteristic within these trends in aesthetic thinking, it would be a desire to ‘reanimate’ what we mean by ‘context’. Context itself has become something that we can't take for granted or assume in some a priori manner. If I can borrow from recent literatures in geography on the dynamic and relational character of place and space, we need a type of thinking that re- awakens or brings back to life ‘Dead Context’ (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000). Context as a living organism is much more than the ‘lived experience’ of the subject – that line of inquiry reinforces the assumption of an unbridgeable gap between materiality and sentience. A re- animated concept of context will need to be relational and dynamic, focused on both possibility and constraint, attentive to ‘Life’ as well as to ‘form’.

We have now entered the thought- universe and preoccupations of one Georg Simmel: sociologist, philosopher, social psychologist, aesthetician, art historian and theorist of everyday life. My desire here is to bring Simmel's thought into dialogue with ecological authors such as Gregory Bateson (1973), James Jerome Gibson (1966; 1979) and Tim Ingold (1993; 2000) who have sought to move beyond reductionist accounts of context. This is a dialogical rather than co- opting move on my part. In particular, I will address how in his reflections on topics such as ‘the picture frame’, ‘the handle’ and the ‘philosophy of landscape’, Simmel (1965a; 1994; 2007) show a significant grasp of the aesthetic ecology of things (on the concept of an ‘aesthetic ecology’, see Murphy 2014).