At least within the last century, artists have produced works that seem to have something missing. Salvatore Garau’s sculpture Sono is (apparently) composed of empty space; the original drawing at the heart of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing is essentially gone; Rauschenberg’s White Paintings are primarily just white canvases. In this paper, I examine this ‘something missing’ – which I call an ‘aesthetic absence’. These absences are aesthetically relevant to the identities, meaning, and value of the works of art (...) where audiences find such absences, but such relevance can only fully be ascertained and assessed once the absence is resolved, and this resolution comes through an act of interpretation. (shrink)

This paper starts with the presentation of an Aristotelian theory of negative properties. Against this backdrop, it then asks whether there could be objects that have solely negative properties, i.e., completely negative objects. This possibility is entertained by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The notion of a completely negative object is compared to the concepts of a nonexistent object, a nonconcrete object, and a nonactual object. Ultimately, it is argued that there can be no completely negative objects, because all negative (...) properties entail some positive properties. (shrink)