The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” and “composition”.

In order to fully render the “ideal of female beauty”, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was planning a picture which he never executed as an individual canvass. Its aim was to show Venus as seen from various perspectives. It was to be achieved through the use of a number of mirrors surrounding Venus in a complete circle. This project implies that the idea standing behind Rossetti’s art was to reveal the woman as the creator both of herself, being a reflection of a concept created beforehand in her mind, as well as a creator of her own image, being a reflection of this “enhanced” her, in the mirrors. At the same time an infinite number of reflections, raises the power of feminine creation to a universal level and becomes a metaphor of her being the patron goddess of art as well. Thus a “universal” space where all different ladies “meet” is created. In his early paintings, Rossetti employs a combination of different “moments of perspective” that make pictorial space “universal”. His late works become separate “mirror perspectives” of Venus. As a collection, they constitute this set of images unattainable in one picture and extend this “universal space” onto the physical space surrounding them. Also, the manner in which these paintings are executed creates an impression of a “reflection” of the eyesight of each heroine outside of the canvass, returning back into the picture. Thus a new quality is given to the connection of the pictorial space within the frames and that surrounding it.

The changes in the subject matter of philosophical aesthetics are accompanied today by changes in evaluation, degradation of the traditional notion of beauty and also rejection of the old rigid division between beauty and ugliness, causing the dissolution of the category divides—in the process anti-value often becomes a value understood as a formal criteria. In the artistic critique the rejection of absolutism in favor of pluralism and diversity is accompanied by the functioning of the old categories in their new meanings. One form of such anti-values is represented by the phenomenon of camp. As a specific kind of a paradox-figure, camp unveils the relation between aesthetization and anaesthetization.The new aesthetics is a dual figure, demanding examination of its two contrary aspects: aesthetical and anaesthetical. Camp’s rejection of the existing hierarchy of values, its admiration of what is not obviously ugly rather than of what is definitely not beautiful, brings this phenomenon close to Wolfgang Welch’s trend of anaesthetics. In many ways camp appears to be a theoretical model of modern identity as well as a specific type of a sophisticated aesthetic game.