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Does the experience of art express truth? Is there knowledge to be found in the work of art? In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that artistic experience, more than simply expressing the beautiful, harbors within it a classical claim to truth fundamental to our understanding and experience of common sense and culture that has nonetheless become obscured as a consequence of our modern conception of truth and knowledge as defined by the natural sciences and modern philosophy. Artistic experience, once understood in terms of a community understanding, is now relegated to subjective taste„a process which Gadamer terms aesthetic differentiation. In a similar vein, Martin Heidegger, in his later critique of metaphysics, claims that our modern technological attitude developed through a metaphysical thinking has lost sight of the meaning of being„our fundamental mode of existing amongst others„and instead understands beings (persons and things) as subjects and objects that can be manipulated and used. As a solution to this, Heidegger looks to poiesis (poetry) for clues in reviving our basic relation to things. In this paper, I will argue that Gadamers project of understanding aesthetic experience and his overall assertion that it provides a mode of self-understanding and common sense is precisely a rigorous examination of poiesis as Heidegger understood it. Moreover, I will claim that Gadamers notion of aesthetic experience understood in terms of Heideggers poiesis does not only reintroduce the artistic back to its place in common sense and culture, but introduces a novel notion of intrinsic valuing that may provide resource for contemporary ethics theory.