This chapter develops the idea of the aesthetic exception, arguing that it should be grasped as the ‘dispositif’ of art – where art’s cultural and institutional location is produced. It argues that the qualifying condition for any work of art is that it is ‘excepted’ from the norms that govern other social praxes. However, it differentiates the exception from art’s supposed autonomous status, although they are closely related, by identifying the aesthetic exception as the space within which the validity of art’s autonomous status can be decided, produced, or conferred upon it. Since that space is historically configured, it is also, however, mutable and contingent. It thus opens up the artwork to the paradox of the exception in that it is the exception that permits art to challenge the very validity conditions that underpin aesthetic autonomy – the ‘rules’ of art. This opens the way for the emergence of the radical practices of the avant-garde, from Dada in the early twentieth century to Fluxus in the mid twentieth century, in which those rules are tested to destruction. However, despite asserting art as a social praxis, what the avant-garde confirms is that it is impossible for art to fundamentally break with its status of exception.