#1.
The pure appearance of art has the advantage that it points through and beyond itself, and itself hints at something spiritual of which it is to give us an idea, whereas immediate appearance does not present itself as deceptive but rather as the real and true, although the truth is in fact contaminated and concealed by the immediacy of sense. The hard shell of nature and the ordinary world make it more difficult for the spirit to penetrate through them to the Idea than works of art do (Aesthetics 9).
It is worth noting that at the beginning of his massive tome Aesthetics, Hegel recalls his opening gambit in the chapter on "Sense-certainty" in the Phenomenology where we saw that sense-certainty's knowledge was not immediate but mediated and thus its "truth" was abstract and poor -- an empty illusion. In order for art to prepare itself to be permeated by spirit it must shed its abstract materiality (roughly akin to the "hard shell of nature"). Here, Hegel needs the notion of "pure appearance," which is located somewhere between mere appearance and matter, on the one hand, and the spiritual and cognitive on the other. In short, art creates the space in which and through which it can come into actual existence. Perhaps we have learned by now that any concept that Hegel values is able to point to, through and beyond itself. If not, we should pay closer attention to the prepositions as opposed to the propositions: "The several prepositions and prefixes translated here as "through," "beyond," "toward," and "out" signify an expression or extrusion outward of something inner, something given presence through a passage through, even a transit. Art in Hegel's view is productive -- this much is a commonplace -- but it is productive of something that appears to counter and overcome the very conditions of its appearance, which are those of passage and transience" (Bahti 100). In other words, art "points through and beyond itself" and it can do this because it exists in the fluid medium of Appearance where essences and senses intermingle; where the sensuous element liquefies and is liquidated as it passes through the "passage" of art, just as spirit materializes and is embodied (takes shape) as it passes through the realm of pure appearances.