Ranciére's notion of “regimes of the arts” appeared for the first time in The Politics of Aesthetics (2004; original French edition 2000). The term captured much of the substantial work of conceptual and historical analysis begun a few years earlier, notably in La parole muette (1998). In this book, Ranciére spoke of “systems of representation” and of “poetic systems”. Since then, his many aesthetic writings have greatly refined and enriched the content of that notion.

The notion of “regimes of the arts” is first a descriptive one. It is the gateway to Ranciére's rich aesthetic thinking. At its heart, the notion serves to identify the specific features of the understanding of art characteristic of modern society, that is, the society that was ushered in by the political, economic and cultural revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crucially, the notion serves to contrast the modern understanding of art, summarized by the term “aesthetic”, from a classical understanding, encapsulated in the terms “poetic” and “representative”.

As always with Ranciére, though, the notion also serves a polemical purpose. With its help, Ranciére wants to contest some of the prominent approaches to art in the contemporary humanities. In particular, the notion is used by him to reject interpretations that frame artistic practices in linear, mono-causal historical narratives: for example, formalist accounts that read the history of an art form as a movement of purification towards the appropriation by that art form of the specificity of its own medium (like surface and colour for painting); or metaphysical interpretations that read modern art works against the background of a teleological vision of history, as the unfolding of some essential logic.