I've been exploring a bit of aesthetics over at junk for code ( here and here) in relation to photography. I have just come across this review by Thomas Huhn of Andrew Benjamin's Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde: Aspects of a Philosophy of Difference, in Surfaces vol. 3. It is not a very good review, as it is too brief for complex material around the reworking of the task of philosophy in terms of the centrality of ontology, that is understood through the differences between modes of being.

Huhn says that Benjamin traces out one of the most crucial implications of his aesthetic ontology in regard to mimesis and the conception and role of the avant-garde. On the former he says:

Plato's stand against mimetic imitation occurs by way of his complaint that artistic renderings are at a third remove from the reality of the Forms. Hence central to the Platonic tradition is a theory of mimetic imitation which entails an ontology of original unity. If one reconsiders mimesis in light of its commitment to a static ontology, mimesis then appears less as the theory of imitation and more as the theory of a certain reflection of ontology. Mimesis, in other words, is a theory of the mirror. And the mirror, we might say, overachieves its task; instead of simply reflecting an ontology, it folds its reflection back in upon itself.

On the latter--the conception and role of the avant-garde --- Huhn says:

If it is the mirror, and with it the tradition of mimesis, that serves to instill and prescribe homogeneity, then it is precisely in regard to it, according to Benjamin, that the conception and task of the avant-garde -- as an affirmation of pluralism -- becomes crucial