Aesthetics is political, but is not itself directed to the political.
In the classic formulation of Schiller, the aesthetic paves the way for enlightened political society. It provides an education at the level of sensibility that is vital towards individuals coming together to establish a genuinely free political community. Aesthetic experience serves as a mediating force, it augurs the reconciliation of sense and rational abstraction, concrete particularity and general law. Yet this mediation depends upon it withdrawing from any particular context of action as such. It is not directed towards mechanical-instrumental ends or social-ethical ends. Its peculiar context of action depends up a suspension of ordinary contexts of action.
This suspension implies that anything can be subject to aesthetic configuration. If aesthetics has a formal aspect, it is not as a form that can be explicated in entirely formal terms. Aesthetics works over things. It distances them from themselves. It renders them mediate, but without ever passing into an abstract language of symmetry, harmony, etc. It delineates things.