## 1. Do works of art exist?




Although artists, critics, and art lovers are likely to think it
absurd to deny that a work of art is as real as anything else one
might encounter, many philosophers and art theorists have raised
questions about the very existence or "mode of being" of
works of art.


### 1.1 Realism




One prevalent response to the question of art's existence is a
straightforward realism to the effect that works of art figure amongst
those entities that, once they have been brought into existence, do
not depend on anyone's (actual or possible) beliefs or
responses. Assuming that something can only be discovered if it
already exists, a striking example of a realist statement is Samuel
Alexander's claim that "Shakespeare
discovered *Hamlet* in the English language the way the
sculptor discovers his figure in the block" (1925, 28). A more
prominent example of a philosopher who defends realism about works of
art is Monroe C. Beardsley (1958), who seems to have espoused the
disjunctive thesis that a work of art is either a particular physical
object or a kind of physical object (see the entry on
Beardsley's aesthetics). Various other options for realism about
artworks will be mentioned below.


### 1.2 Modes of being and existence




Some philosophers postulate a plurality of modes of being, and some of
these philosophers have attributed modes of being other than existence
to works of art. An example is C. E. M. Joad, who included a fairly
lengthy discussion of issues related to the ontology of art in his
popular *Guide to Philosophy* of 1936.




Joad denied that a work such as Shakespeare's *Hamlet*
could be correctly identified with any existing concrete particular,
such as a script, or with a collection of events, such as those
involved in a staging of the play. Nor should the title
'Hamlet' be taken as referring to ideas in the
author's mind, to some spectator's experience of the work,
or to some collection of experiences occasioned by performances of the
play. Joad's alternative was to say that the work of art is
a *subsistent* object, neither mental nor material, which, like
other universals, is a constituent of the universe possessing a
special kind of being, subsistence, in its own right. According to
Joad, then, at least some works are subsistent universals, and this is
the sort of entity to which the titles of such works of art refer.




In his Mellon lectures presented at the National Gallery in Washington
in 1955 (published in 1957), Etienne Gilson classified works of
art as Aristotelian substances (for background, see the entries on
substance and Aristotle's metaphysics). Gilson also claimed that a
work has aesthetic and artistic modes of existence in addition to a
substantial one. A work exists artistically *qua* product of
the artist's activity, whereas it exists aesthetically when it is the
object of someone's aesthetic (or contemplative) experience. A similar
plurality of modes of existence of works of art had been postulated by
Etienne Souriau (1943, 1947), who posited thing-like
[*chosale*], aesthetic, and transcendent modes of
existence.


### 1.3 The Imagination and fictionalism




In attributing artistic and aesthetic modes of existence to works,
Gilson adverted to a physical object's relation to the
experiences and actions of cognizing subjects. Similarly, a long
series of philosophers have taken subjective relations and experiences
to be crucial to answering the question of the existence of works of
art. It has often been proposed, for example, that works are at least
in part a product of the imagination, and this not merely in the sense
that some artist must imagine what sort of thing he or she wants to
make or do if a work of art is to be brought into existence. Instead,
the thought is that even the existence or reality of a completed work
of art continues to depend on the make-believe or imaginative activity
of the artist or some other subject, such as the observer or reader
who appreciates the work as a work of art.




That the imagination plays a crucial role in aesthetic responses to
both art and nature was an important theme in 18th-century
aesthetics (see the entries on French, British, and German aesthetics
in the 18th century). Joseph Addison's (1712)
description of the "pleasures of the imagination" was
influential, yet not as influential perhaps as Immanuel Kant's
idea that the activation of the power or faculty of the imagination
was essential to aesthetic judgments (for more detail, see the entry
on Kant's aesthetics). In the 19th and
20th centuries, various thinkers contended that the
imagination plays a crucial role in both the creation and the
reception of works of art. Prominent examples of philosophers who
emphasized the importance of *Einbildungskraft*
or *Phantasie* in this regard include Friedrich Theodor Vischer
(1857, 1898), Robert Zimmermann (1865), Hermann Lotze (1884), Eduard
von Hartmann (1888), Karl Kostlin (1869, 1889), Konrad von Lange
(1895, 1901, 1912, 1935), Christian von Ehrenfels (1896-1899,
318), and Johannes Volkelt (1905-1915).




Von Hartmann (1888, vol. 2, 11) rejects what he called
"naive realistic" assumptions about the objects of
aesthetic or artistic judgements. Arguing for a "transcendental
realism," he contends that beauty is not a material object, but
a subjective appearance, like the sweetness of sugar. Von Hartmann
observes that people confidently say such things as "this book
is Homer's *Iliad*," "this score is Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony," and "this painting is
Raphael's *Sistine Madonna*." Although it is often
acknowledged that the first two examples are philosophically
untenable, it ought to be admitted, von Hartmann contends, that the
third sort of statement is also inaccurate. The painted surface in
itself is not beautiful even though in some circumstances it has the
capacity to contribute to a subjective appearance of beauty, which von
Hartmann characterizes as *Schein* or *Phantasie*. If
the work of art is the bearer or *locus* of beauty and other
aesthetic properties, it cannot be the material object in itself. Yet
Hartmann also contests what he called "subjective
idealism," and in his discussion of artistic creation emphasizes
the artist's engagement with the material constraints of artistic
media. The "phantasy work" that an artist elaborates prior
to the creation of an "external work of art" is never
neutral with regard to media or instrumentation (1888, vol. 2,
180).




Konrad von Lange held that imaginative play and an attitude he called
'conscious self-deception' [*die bewusste
Selbsttauschung*] are necessary to both the creation and
appreciation of art. He did not explicitly draw the conclusion that
works of art are therefore fictions, but he did describe our commerce
with them as a kind of lucid illusion in which we playfully entertain
thoughts of states of affairs that we know not to exist. The artistic
artifact, he proposed, is like the toy or other object that is
recruited to the ends of a child's imaginative play. A sophisticated
and highly influential contemporary exponent of this kind of approach
to art and, more specifically, to the philosophical analysis of
depiction and fictional content, is Kendall L. Walton (1990).




Jean-Paul Sartre (1938, 1940) has often been credited with the idea
that works of art are illusory (in the sense of systematically being
the object of some sort of error about their mode of existence), but
it is not obvious that this is the best interpretation of his remarks
on the topic. Sartre declares that Beethoven's Seventh Symphony
"is outside of the *real*, outside of existence"
(1940, 371, my trans.). He also says that we do not really hear the
symphony at all, but only hear the composition in our imaginations.
Such statements can be read as being meant to debunk a widespread
illusory belief in the existence of musical works; they also hold open
the possibility of imagining works without believing in their
existence, in which case the putative illusion is not necessary. One
of the possible targets of Sartre's remarks is a kind of idealist
doctrine discussed below. For an informative discussion of Sartre's
views on the subject, see Peter V. Lamarque (2010, chapter 10); and
for additional background, see the entry on existentialist
aesthetics.




On this topic Sartre was preceded and possibly influenced by Ingarden
and Nicolai Hartmann, who was professor of theoretical philosophy in
Berlin at the time of Sartre's stint at the *Institut
francais* in Berlin from 1933-1934. In a paper
presented at the International Congress of Philosophy held at Harvard
in 1926 and published in 1927, Hartmann contrasted psychological and
ontological approaches in aesthetics and argued for the priority of
the latter. In this paper he outlined positions that he was to develop
at length in a series of works, including his (1933) and an unfinished
treatise on aesthetics, written in 1945 and published posthumously in
1953.




Hartmann's central thesis on the ontology of art is that works
are fictions that depend upon the perceptual and imaginative
activities of artists and their audiences. In Hartmann's view,
the work of art has at least two parts or strata: the first layer,
which he sometimes refers to as the "foreground," is
perceptible--Hartmann's examples include a piece of stone,
colors on a surface, and audible sounds. The perception of such items
is the basis of the aesthetic experience of the higher
"background" stratum, which also requires imaginings
occasioned by this perceptual experience. The artistic and aesthetic
qualities of the work arise from the relation between these
'heterogeneous' levels. Hartmann's discussion of the
artwork's strata resembles some of the claims made by
Ingarden. It would appear that the two philosophers arrived at these
results independently; for a comparison of their positions, see
Wolfgang Ruttkowski (1990).




Hartmann maintains that as a result of its dependence upon the
imagination, the work of art lacks independent or autonomous being, or
what he calls '*Ansichsein*'. A work is an
observer-relative appearance or *Erscheinung*, experienced as
such. An appearance experienced *as appearance* is not to be
confused, however, with illusion or *Schein* because it
involves self-reflexive awareness that something is being imagined as
opposed to believed. In this regard Hartmann evokes the familiar
analogy to children's imaginative play, while commenting that
for the adult such play "remains fiction" (1953, 53).




Hartmann's concept of artistic appearance does not embrace
only the depictive or symbolic contents of representational works of
art, as Hartmann also applies his levels analysis to the aesthetic
properties of non-figurative works, including architectural ones.
A building *qua* material object obviously figures amongst the
real entities of the world, but to experience the material building as
a work of art is to engage in the imaginative apprehension of fictional
qualities. Hartmann appears to be claiming in this regard that
such terms as 'grandiose', 'pompous' or
'majestic', are, when used as labels to name the aesthetic
qualities of a building, in some sense imaginative and hence
fictional.




Kindred approaches to the question of the work's existence
have been developed by a number of different figures, an early instance
being the American philosopher Stephen C. Pepper, who describes how the
imagination contributes to a process in which "an aesthetic work
of art is created out of a physical work of art" (1937a, 231;
1955). Pepper, who was a professor of philosophy at the
University of California at Berkeley, was on the same panel as Hartmann
at the 1926 Congress mentioned above. It is not clear, however,
whether Pepper embraced Hartmann's conclusion that works of art
are in some sense fictions. Pepper argued for a relativist
conception whereby ontological issues depend ultimately on such
overarching rival frameworks as organicism, mechanism, and pragmatism
or "contextualism." Pepper explicitly denied that any
one of these frameworks was the one true theory.




Another philosopher whose early contributions merit attention in
this vein is Joseph Margolis (1958, 1959, 1961). Margolis
describes a work of art as being comprised of a physical system (for
example, a lump of clay) and an aesthetic design. To behold
something as a work of art, it is necessary to combine a sensory
perception of the physical item with an imaginative experience of the
aesthetic design. The design "supervenes" upon the
physical system. Margolis suggests that whereas contradictory
assertions about a physical object cannot both be true, the principle
of noncontradiction does not apply to the description of works of
art.


### 1.4 Intermittence




Margolis (1958) explicitly endorses one implication of his
hypothesis regarding the way of being or *Seinsweise* of the
work of art. In the absence of the right sort of attention, the
work ceases to exist, even though the physical system remains
intact. Yet the same work can return to existence when the same
sort of imaginative attention is directed upon the physical system that
constitutes the supervenience base of the artwork, thereby
"reviving" the correlative aesthetic design.




Several philosophers (e.g., Eleanor Rowland 1913, 117, Gilson 1957,
Hilde Hein 1959, Andrew Harrison 1967-68, Currie 1989, 57) have
questioned the wisdom of allowing that the existence of a work is
intermittent. An early example is Johannes Volkelt (1905, 11), who
asserts that the statue of Zeus in Otricoli was a work of art
throughout the many centuries during which it lay buried and
unobserved. As Wolterstorff later put it, "Have not
Beethoven's quartets, Rembrandt's prints, and
Yeats's poems existed at least ever since their
composition?" (1980, 43). As will become apparent below, a
desire to find some alternative to the hypothesis of intermittent
existence has influenced some of the proposals about the category of
enduring or perduring entities to which artworks should be said to
belong. For example, Andrew Paul Ushenko characterized works as powers
so as to avoid the intermittence problem (1953, 47), and similar
intuitions motivated Pepper's (1965)
"double-dispositional" account, according to which a
work's continuous existence depends on the "passive
disposition" of a physical object as well as the "dynamic
disposition" of the observer.


### 1.5 Idealism




It would be quite misleading to give the impression that all of those
philosophers who thought minds and their activities have something to
do with the existence of works of art also thought that this means
that works were somehow less real than, say, natural physical entities
and events. Idealists invert this hierarchy. This is explicit in
Benedetto Croce (1913, 1965, 9-10) when he asserts that works of
art cannot be physical entities because works of art are
"supremely real" whereas the physical world is
"unreal."




Another proponent of an idealist ontology of art is Waldemar Conrad
(1908-09). Conrad stressed Edmund Husserl's contrast
between "natural" and "phenomenological"
attitudes and their objects (for background, see the entries on
Husserl and phenomenology). Conrad asserts that only the latter
attitude can reveal the "ideal Object" that is the genuine
or intended [*gemeinte*] work of art. In his example, which
could well have served as the counterpoint for Sartre's
discussion of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the genuine work is
the symphony itself as opposed to the various spatiotemporal events,
such as more or less competent orchestral performances, or
someone's whistling the melody or reading the score, that might
help to direct attention to some of the work's essential
features (1908-09, 77-78). Conrad does not present a
detailed defense of his assumptions about the ontology of ideal
objects, but clearly shared Husserl's aversion to psychologism
(for background, see the entry on psychologism).




Croce's (1902, 1913, 1948) claims about works (and ideas) as
"expressions" of experience generated a lot of controversy
and did much to put ontological issues on the agenda of aesthetics and
the philosophy of art (for background, see the entry on Croce's
aesthetics). British proponents of Croce-inspired aesthetics
included Lascelles Abercrombie (1922), who promoted the idea that the
work is an experience, and P. Leon (1931), who rhapsodized about the
aesthetic object as an experienced *quale*. Drawing upon a
broad Platonic and Romantic background, George W. Beiswanger (1939)
developed the view that the "material" work is merely a
means to the aesthetic object, which he characterized as
"experienced experiencing," an idea inspired, apparently,
by John Dewey's remark that "the actual work of art is what
the product does with and in experience" (1934, 3).




By far the most influential Croce-inspired aesthetician was Robin
George Collingwood (1925, 1938), whose several translations of
Croce's work helped make the Italian philosopher's views
more accessible to readers bereft of Italian (for background and
references, see Alan Donagan 1972). As Collingwood's
philosophy of art is the subject of a separate entry as well as various
commentaries (e.g., Ian Winchester 2004, David Davies 2008), we can be
brief here. For some purposes talk of a
"Croce-Collingwood" theory of art is good enough, but of
course differences come to the fore when one reads these authors with
an eye to detail. It seems fair to say that for Collingwood, the
work of art is not a physical object or finished artifact, but the
conscious imaginative activity through which creative expression takes
place. That works are the activity of the imagination does not
make them any less real in Collingwood's opinion.




An objection to all theories that invite us to think of
works of art as experiences--those of the artist and/or those of
the audience--is that this is a conflation of an experience and
the object of the experience. It is one thing to acknowledge that
a work is the product or even the expression of an experience and
that it is designed to occasion certain kinds of experiences; it is
something else entirely to assert that the work is itself an experience
and nothing more. Such an account neglects the physical
dimensions of art, beginning with the artist's encounter with
materials and media. It is also objected that the attempted
reduction of artworks to experiences would convert a public, culturally
situated entity into something private. Early worries of this
sort were articulated in relation to Croce's aesthetics by
Alexander (1925) and Louis Arnauld Reid (1926). More recently,
these objections have been raised against Roger Scruton's (1997)
ontology of musical works by Jerrold Levinson (2000), who explicitly
links Scruton's account to the legacy of Collingwood and
idealism.




Not all philosophers have agreed that all works of art must be
public. In his taxonomy of the fine arts, Bernard Bolzano
distinguishes between the arts of the external senses and those of
pure thought (1849, 16). The latter arts produce works comprised of
complex ideas or thoughts that are not linguistically articulated and
that are only directly accessible to the person thinking of
them. Bolzano remarks that this feature of the arts of pure thought is
a great imperfection. He adds, however, that these arts often play a
role in the creation of those works of art, such as statues and songs,
that are perceptible to audiences.


### 1.6 Elimination




Given a sufficiently austere ontology, titles such as 'Das Lied
von der Erde' and 'To the Lighthouse' have no real
referents. Those who defend such an ontology are rarely eager to
trumpet the implications for the arts, perhaps because doing so would
be a poor recommendation for the austerity. A few thinkers writing
about aesthetics have, however, conjectured that we would be better
off without committing ourselves to the existence of works. For
example, Richard Rudner (1950) distinguished between questions about
the object of our aesthetic responses and questions about the
referents of the names of works. The answer to the latter question is
that such names are non-designative or syncategorematic. The former
question, Rudner concludes, is not scientific and should be set
aside.




Roland Barthes (1971) notoriously asserted that the concept of the
work of art is part of a repressive ideology that should be replaced
by a liberating conception of textuality. The word
'textualite' referred in his mind to a highly
indeterminate and exciting sphere of semantic and erotic
possibilities; 'une oeuvre' [a work] stood for an
ideological drag involving wrong-headed thinking about fixed meanings,
ownership, and repression.




In a somewhat similar spirit but without Barthes's
poststructuralist idiom, Stephen David Ross (1977) contends that there
is no work of art *simpliciter*, but any number of discriminable
achievements or loci of artistic value.




Anders Pettersson (1981, 1984, 1990, 2009, 2012) contends that talk of
a text or literary work can be eliminated. He acknowledges that the
concept of a literary work forms part of ordinary language and is
useful in theoretically undemanding contexts, but he also argues that
it is a self-contradictory construct that creates many pseudo-problems
for literary theory. We can say what we need to say about literature
in a theoretically adequate way without making any ontological
commitments to texts or works and without introducing any new entities
by referring to such phenomena as physical copies of texts, texts in
the sense of sequences of signs, or meaning in its different
varieties.




A more recent proponent of an eliminativist strategy is Ross P. Cameron
(2008), who contends that we need not make works of art part of our
fundamental metaphysics. Even so, we can still hold our common
sense statements about them to be true. For criticisms of the
idea that this eliminativist position is compatible with common sense
or well-entrenched practices, see Robert Stecker (2009) and Stefano
Predelli (2009).


## 2. Monism and its rivals




In this context 'monism' is simply a label for the idea
that all works of art fall within one ontological category, such as
abstract particulars. A prevalent argument against this sort of thesis
rests on the distinction between performance and non-performance
works: many musical works can be performed by various persons and on
various occasions; a painting cannot. Having described such
distinctions amongst works of art, Wolterstorff concludes tersely that
"Works of art are not all alike in their ontological
status" (1975, 230). According to Stephen Davies (1993), we need
not look beyond the art of music to find grounds for rejecting
ontological monism. More recently, Robert Howell (2002a, 2002b) has
argued that if the term 'work of art' covers artistic
improvisations, the various utterances referred to as 'oral
literature', and such items as paintings and scored musical
compositions, then no single adequate ontological category is to be
found. With reference to artists' stipulative authority over the
"features and boundaries" of their works, Sherri Irvin
declares that "Any claim to the effect that all works belong to
the same ontological category will thus come out false or
uninformative" (2008, 1). Yet as will become clear below, monism
still has its proponents.


### 2.1 Multiple vs. singular artistic items




Many debates over monism and rivals to that position have hinged on
the question of reproduction and multiple instances, the thought being
that in the case of at least some works, adequate technologies of
reproduction yield more than one instance of an artistic artifact, and
*therefore* of the work (an entailment that does not go
unchallenged, as we shall see below). For example, it would be highly
implausible to contend that Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous
photographic work, "Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris"
(1932), consists in the negative used to make prints, or in the first
or any other single print of this picture. Multiply instantiated works
form one major category, then, while singular or non-reproducible ones
form another.




It has been complained, however, that this distinction ought not to
be taken as decisive for an ontology of art since it rests upon a
contingent thesis about what is technologically possible.




The question of how technological change can influence our basic
conception of works of art was raised by Walter Benjamin in a famous
essay, a first version of which appeared in French in 1936 (translated
literally, the title is 'The Work of Art in the Age of its
Mechanical Reproducibility'). Benjamin is generally interpreted
as claiming that the advent of techniques of mechanical reproduction
has undermined the quasi-religious "aura" that previously
surrounded the individual work of art. Benjamin appears to have viewed
such technological change as part of a liberating or progressive
historical process. Whether Benjamin held that no work of art really
was or could be an "authentic" concrete particular is hard
to determine, however, as the history of art's political
functions is the primary focus of his somewhat obscure essay. Benjamin
does declare early on (in both the first and revised versions of his
essay) that "In principle, the work of art has always been
reproducible. Objects made by humans could always be copied by
humans" (2008, 20).




Other philosophers have argued that technological possibility should
not be thought decisive with regard to the soundness of a monist
ontology of art: the important philosophical question is what is
nomologically or metaphysically possible. A relatively early
example is C. I. Lewis's oft-overlooked (1946) discussion of the
ontology of the work of art.




Drawing on the work of Pepper and D. W. Prall (1929, 1936), Lewis held
that an aesthetic appreciation of art is based on the contemplation of
an "aesthetic essence" presented by the work. Lewis
describes an aesthetic essence as "a certain composition of
sense or qualia" and as "an immediate apprehension of
sense" (1946, 188). Lewis also writes in this context of
"qualitatively identical items of content (Santayana's
'essences'?)" (1946, 18), thereby suggesting he is
not quite sure whether his notion of an essence comes close to that of
George Santayana, who described essences as the immediate data of
experience (1923). (For background, see the entry on Clarence Irving
Lewis, and especially the section on "the given.")



When we appreciate a painting, Lewis contends, what we contemplate is
what this canvas could have in common with some optimal reproduction
of it, namely, "that qualitative and abstract essence which is
here incorporated, and is theoretically repeatable in some other
physical object" (1946, 477). Lewis claims that an aesthetic
object always depends upon some physical object, but he maintains that
these dependency relations differ in degree: a poem depends on a
particular inscription less than a work of visual art depends on a
particular visible object. A poem, he proposes, is "an
abstraction which is actualized in the instances of its presentation,
through the medium of some physical vehicle. It is an entity
essentially repeatable in, or common to, different physical events or
things which instance it" (1946, 474-475). Lewis goes on to say
that the abstractness of works is not like that of universals in that
the latter "stand in contrast to anything which is sensuously
qualitative and imaginal" (1946, 475). Lewis also maintains that
a work or art is not just a type of visual appearance abstracted from
a physical object, or in Lewis's terms, an artistic
vehicle. Instead, for Lewis, the aesthetic essence constitutive of the
identity of the work of art, as opposed to the physical object,
"lies in *the context associated with* this physical
entity which presents it" (1946, 474, Lewis's
italics). Lewis holds that if the observer does not take this
associated context into account in the interpretation of the vehicle,
the work of art is misapprehended or not apprehended at all:
"whatever the subject must bring to the presentation, in order
correctly to understand the poem presented, belongs to the poem"
(1946, 474).




Note that Lewis considers every aesthetic essence to be "an
abstraction which theoretically could be identically presented by
another physical thing" (1946, 476). Similar claims to the
effect that all works of art are multiple, at least in principle and
*qua* objects of appreciation, were subsequently made by Ushenko
(1953, 21-25), Peter Strawson (1959, 231, n. 1; 1974, 183), Jeanne
Wacker (1960), Anthony Savile (1971), Eddie Zemach (1966, 1986), and
Currie (1989). 




Many other writers have, on the contrary, stressed the singularity of
at least some works of art and/or some of their constituents.
Croce's influential (1903) diatribe against the
"science" of genres stands at the top of a list that
includes George Boas (1937), Henri Focillon (1934, 56), Souriau (1947,
70), Stuart Hampshire (1952), Ingarden (1962), Nelson Goodman (1968),
Richard Wollheim (1968), Wolterstorff (1975, 1980), Catherine Lord
(1977), Mark Sagoff (1978), E. J. Lowe (1983), Levinson (1987, 1996),
Gerard Genette (1994), Anthony O'Hear (1995), Irvin
(2008), and Michael Weh (2010).




The diversity of arguments and positions on this broad particularist
theme should be noted. For example, Ingarden reacts negatively to the
prospect of a multiplicity of perfect replicas of the cathedral of
Notre Dame de Paris: seeing such things side by side, he comments,
would cause "the strongest displeasure, precisely because it
belongs to the nature of the work of art to be an individual, in the
sense of something qualitatively unique" (1989, 274; 1962,
278). O'Hear defends a "singularity thesis" to the
effect that "works of distinction" are necessarily
individual and unique, whereas Weh argues that artistic intentions
constrained by the historical circumstances determine whether and when
a work is reproducible or multiple. Wolterstorff's line on this
topic is that in the case of many paintings, the artist does not
settle on a set of properties that establish criteria for correctness
of instances or "occurrences" of the work (1980,
72). Genette maintains that the reproducibility of works of art is a
matter of an institutionally codified consensus based on a balance
between means and needs (1994, 101).




In a paper published posthumously in 2001, Frank Sibley contends that
a "two-directional pull" is a pervasive feature of the
practices and discourses of art, at least with regard to visual works
of art such as the *Mona Lisa*. If a painting is a particular
physical object, the work of art referred to as the *Mona Lisa*
may or may not be a painting: "Perhaps it both is and is not,
can be and need not be" (2001, 272). We are interested in the
unique physical object, yet we also find that a copy can serve many of
the same functions, including artistic and aesthetic ones. So either
we have two distinct concepts of works of this kind, or we have
inherited what Sibley calls an "uneasy composite or hybrid of
two conflicting notions" (2001, 272).


### 2.2 Artistic vehicles vs. works of art




One source of confusion in this area is divergent assumptions about
both the extension and intension of the expression 'work of
art' and its cognates: what is it, exactly, that can or cannot
be classified in a single, basic ontological category? Whereas Virgil
Aldrich (1963) proclaims the term 'work of art' useful
because of its ambivalence, others (e.g., Boas 1937) have found the
pervasive ambiguity in the discourse about artworks (starting with a
process/product conflation) troublesome and in need of
clarification. I. A. Richards famously wrote that people
"naturally talk about poems (and pictures, etc.) in a way which
makes it impossible for anybody to discover what it is we are talking
about" (1924, 176). Evoking the "vague" and
"diverse" usage of the term, Francis Sparshott (1963)
worried that the question about what sort of thing a work of art is
might have no precise answer. Richard Shusterman concurs, and passes
the question of the identity of the work of art along to the
"piecemeal efforts of practicing art critics" (1980,
543). Claudine Tercelin (2005) develops a Peircean perspective attuned
to the possibility of an irreducible, ontic vagueness in art (and
elsewhere).




Thomasson (2005) argues that the relevant sortals yield only vague and
incomplete identity and persistence conditions. As a result, some
questions in the ontology of art admit of no precise answers. A good
example would be the question of just how faulty a performance of a
difficult composition can be and still count as a performance of the
work. She also holds that there is no justifiable response to the
question of whether a poem has actually been created when the poet has
a complete sequence of words in mind but has never spoken it aloud or
written it down (2005, 227). Thomasson's skepticism, however, is
a limited one: some art-ontological questions do have determinate
answers about which sufficiently well-informed practitioners in the
world of art could not be wrong. Thomasson reasons that competent
users of the discourse successfully refer to particular novels,
paintings, and symphonies, so they must have reliable concepts when it
comes to the relevant art kinds. Thomasson does not, however, believe
that the same argument works for the more general concept, *work of
art*.




Dominic McIver Lopes (2007) accepts the premise that art-ontological
questions find answers in sound art-appreciative practice, but
conjectures, with reference to examples of Japanese architecture, that
such practices vary significantly across cultures. Rafael De Clercq
(2008) proposes an alternative explication of the Japanese examples;
in a response to De Clercq, Lopes surveys the options and concludes
that they "all challenge some widespread philosophical doctrines
about the cultural invariance of ontology or reference" (2008,
196).





Pepper, who struggled with art-ontological issues for several decades,
ended up proclaiming in his (1952) that 'work of art' is
best understood as a "portmanteau" expression on which are
hung significantly different conceptual garments. In his early
writings on the ontology of art (e.g., 1937b, 231; 1946), Pepper had
distinguished between the work of art and "the aesthetic
work." In response to published objections and queries (Nathan
Berall 1951, James L. Jarrett 1952, Robert Hoffman 1962), he later
drew a distinction between what he proposed to call 'the control
object' (that he had previously referred to as the
'physical work of art' or 'the vehicle') and
the object of critical evaluation (previously, 'the aesthetic
work of art').




Various terms for a distinction in this vicinity have been
employed. Hermann Siebek (1875, 7) and von Hartmann (1888, vol. 2, 35,
208) both used the term '*Vehikel*' to refer to the
material or perceptible bases of aesthetic objects and works of
art. Volkelt (1905, 11) used the term
'*Ausserdinge*' to refer to the non-psychological
items that make up what he called the "pre-aesthetic basis of
the work of art." H. S. Goodhart-Rendel (1934) distinguished
between the material of art, the artistic vehicle, and the work of
art. His idea is that the vehicle is whatever is used to
"externalize" the work or to "disclose it to the
world" (1934, 4). In the case of music, the sound is the
vehicle; sound is not the artist's material, however, because
some musicians can compose in their heads, and on
Goodhart-Rendel's usage, only those media that are necessary to
working in an art form are to be taken as materials. All that is
strictly necessary to musical composition is an idea or thought of a
sequence of sounds.




The term 'vehicle' was taken up again by Harold Osborne,
who defined it as what "enables the same organization of material
to enter the experience of different persons at different times"
(1953, 96). A particular arrangement of pigments upon a canvas or
some other surface could be the vehicle of a work, but the work itself
is distinct from its material component. The work is not the
vehicle alone, but "an enduring possibility, often enshrined or
recorded in a material medium, of a specific set of sensory
impressions" (1953, 100).




For those who dislike the medical and other connotations of the term
'vehicle', there are other options. Ruby Meager uses
the term 'manifestation', commenting that "a poem is
like a universal in being capable of multiple manifestations of which
no single one can count as the poem itself" (1958-59, 52).
Many writers have preferred the term 'instances'.
Currie, for example, defines 'instance' as "all those
concrete things that we come into contact with when we experience a
work of art" (1989, 5).




Why distinguish between the work of art and its vehicle,
manifestation, or control object? Various reasons have motivated such
distinctions. One line of thought is that a work is
"constituted" by a material object or vehicle, where the
constitution relation is not a matter of identity (for background, see
the entry on material constitution). Roger Pouivet (2000, 2010) has
brought such arguments to bear on a number of issues in the ontology
of art. Simon J. Evnine (2009, 2016) develops a constitution theory as
well.




John Dilworth (2005a) distinguishes between the concrete artifact or
event and the artwork. In his view the relation between them is
representational. The artifact or event represents the work, which in
turn represents other content, namely, the subject matter of the
work.




In an analogy that some philosophers (e.g., Arthur C. Danto 1993,
199-200) have taken quite seriously, the vehicle is to the work
as the body is to the person; for a very early remark in this vein,
see Johan Georg Sulzer (1792, vol. 4, 727), who declares that the work
of art has both body (the artistic material or *Stoff*), and
soul or *Geist* (the representation
or *Darstellung*). Another way of motivating the distinction in
aesthetics is to say, along with Pepper and others, that reference to
the vehicle or artistic structure alone does not suffice to identify
the object of critical evaluation, or what artistic and aesthetic
appreciation is really about.




The next section evokes a commonly told story about the basis
of a work-object distinction, indicating some ways in which this story
is misleading.


#### 2.2.1 Indiscernibility and the story of Pierre Menard




In his widely cited 1964 paper, "The Artworld," Danto
cleverly evoked ways in which perceptually indistinguishable painted
canvases could be the vehicles of strikingly different works of art
bearing different titles and contrasting artistic and aesthetic
qualities. It follows, Danto reasons, that the painted canvas
alone is not the work of art, unless'is'has a special sense.




In a reply to questions raised by Sparshott (1976), Danto claimed to
have been "loosely following a famous model in the philosophy of
perception" when he began to explore the implications of
indiscernibles for issues in aesthetics (1976, 80). Yet at the
outset of the second chapter of his 1981 book, *The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace*, Danto commented: "the possibility was
first recognized, I believe, in connection with literary works, by
Borges, who has the glory of having discovered it in his masterpiece,
*Pierre Menard, Symbolist Poet*" [sic]. 




It is certainly the case that many philosophers have found inspiration
in Jorge Luis Borges's 1939 story, "Pierre Menard, autor
del Quijote," an English translation of which first appeared in
1962 (for more on this topic, see Livingston and Pettersson
2016). This short story is not easy to summarize, but one relevant
part of it concerns a French symbolist who sets out to create a novel
by rewriting--without simply copying--the text of
Cervantes's masterpiece. The narrator of the story makes
observations about ways in which Menard's work would be
different from Cervantes's even if Menard somehow managed to
produce something "verbally identical" to what Cervantes
had written.




In English-language philosophical publications, the earliest reference
to the tale and to its implications for the ontology of art appears in
Savile's (1971) essay on Goodman's *Languages of
Art* (for background, see the entry on Goodman's
aesthetics). Subsequent references to the story's philosophical
implications include Walton (1973), Wollheim (1978), Goodman (1978),
David K. Lewis (1978), Levinson (1980a, 2012), Ben Tilghman (1982),
Susan Wilsmore (1987), Currie (1989), Jean-Marie Schaefer (1989),
Michael Wreen (1990), David Davies (1991, 2010), Christopher Janaway
(1992), Lamarque (1998, 2010), Jacques Morizot (1999), and the papers
in Petr Kot'atko and Karel Cisar (2004).




Savile presented what he referred to as the
"Borges-paradox" in order to contest some of
Goodman's claims about the individuation of works of art. More
specifically, Goodman had distinguished between
"autographic" and "allographic" works, where
the former, unlike the latter, are susceptible to forgery. Moving
quickly, the thought is that while it is possible to make a more or
less successful forgery of a particular painting, it is impossible to
make a deceptive copy of a work of literature because any verbally
identical instance of the text is a good copy of the work, or in
Goodman's terms, an instance produced in conformity with a
system of notation (for discussion of Goodman's distinction, see
Levinson 1980b, Pillow 2003, and the entry on
 Goodman's aesthetics).




Savile presents the Pierre Menard case as a counterexample to
Goodman's thesis that the identity conditions of allographic
works are determined by a notational scheme.




Two numerically distinct tokens of the same "verbally
identical" text-type could be generated by different literary
authors--Menard and Cervantes--working in significantly
different artistic contexts. These could, then, be the texts of two
artistically different works. Ergo, the work is not the text. Turning
from literature to music, Savile asks us to imagine a case where
Stockhausen independently composes "an ode notationally and
semantically identical" with a composition by Stamitz. Savile
proposes that "We should certainly not say that they had
composed the same work, for the way in which it would be appropriate
to hear them would be quite different" (1971, 23; cf. Levinson
1980a).




The Borgesian narrator also floats the idea that one work could have
two artistically different texts, which could be taken as reinforcing
a Borges-inspired assault on a text-to-work biconditional (Paisley
Livingston 2005a). Generalizing, we end up with a broad distinction
between works of art and their "objects" or vehicles.




There has unsurprisingly been some skepticism about both
the distinction between vehicle and work, and the idea that cogent
reasoning in favor of such a distinction is really to be found in the
Borges story. Tilghman (1982), Currie (1989, 134 n. 19) and
Lamarque (2010), for example, raise questions about the intelligibility
and coherence of that part of the Borges story that concerns Pierre
Menard's unusual intentions and putative achievement with regard
to the writing of "his" Quixote. What are we supposed
to imagine about Menard's ambition in setting out to
"rewrite" but not copy the text of the novel by
Cervantes? Is this a psychologically coherent project? What
is more, is there any good reason to think of his text as a new
work? For denials, see Goodman (1978) and Goodman and Catherine
Z. Elgin (1988), who contend that Menard's text, if brought to
completion, would only be a "replica" of
Cervantes's.




With regard to the text-work distinction and the more general
arguments given in support of it, various doubts have been
raised. Wollheim (1993) challenges the evidentiary value of thought
experiments in a context where the concept in question--in this
case, the one evoked by the expression 'work of
art'--has no determinate conditions for its application,
but only some broad assumptions that can easily be
"transgressed" by the apparent results of a thought
experiment. Tilghman had complained a decade earlier that Danto did
not specify any criteria of work constitution. Tilghman (1982) added
that the ontological question of constitution is in any case not
crucial to questions about criticism and appreciation.




It can also be reasonably doubted whether the Borges story truly
merits the "glory" of discovery to which Danto
alludes. Lamarque (1998, 2010) finds evidence of the key
contextualist insight, or at least closely related points, in passages
from both Shakespeare and Kant.


#### 2.2.2 Carl Lange's indiscernibles




Another earlier and little-known contribution on our topic was made by
the Danish physician and neurologist, Carl Georg Lange
(1834-1900). Lange's book of 1899, *Bidrag til
Nydelsernes Fysiologi som grundlag for en rationel aestetik*,
the title of which can be translated quite literally as
'Contribution to the Physiology of the Pleasures as Foundation
for a Rational Aesthetics', begins with a lengthy survey of the
author's ideas about the nature of the various sources of
enjoyment or pleasure, and then moves on to apply these ideas to the
arts and beauty.




Lange argues that the various sorts of enjoyments or pleasures [the
Danish '*nydelser*' is ambiguous between the two]
given to us by works of art have a few basic sources, including
variety [*afvekslingen*] and the arousal of sympathy. He also
stresses the art appreciator's admiration of the artist's manifest
overcoming of artistic difficulties in the creation of the work. The
awareness that very few people, or perhaps even only a unique
individual [*den Enkelte*], could have brought about a particularly
innovative and difficult artistic achievement is a distinct source of artistic
enjoyment. Lange wants to argue that this type of artistic enjoyment
depends upon the appreciator's awareness of aspects of the art
object's origins. One can only admire a work, in the special sense of
artistic admiration or '*beundring*' conceived of
by Lange, to the extent that one can understand and evaluate the
artistic difficulties the artist has overcome. Although Lange here
repeats a claim made in earlier aesthetic treatises (e.g. Veron
1878, 63), he takes the argument one step further. He turns to an
imaginary indiscernibility example in an effort to make a point about
the relevant aspects "in a work" [*i et
Vaerk*] that can give rise to the special kind of enjoyment
he has in mind:



> 
> 
> There are examples where people, and this includes even the experts,
> disagree over which of two paintings is the original and which is a
> copy. In such a situation one should think that the artistic
> pleasures these two paintings occasion must be more or less the same,
> and indeed they are, up to the moment when the doubt is removed.
> Once this happens the difference is very large, as history shows.
> Nothing prevents us in any case from imagining a copy that so
> perfectly reproduces the original that there is no way to distinguish
> them from each other. Yet there is all the difference in the
> world between the enjoyments they occasion. The enjoyment value
> of the copy, and with it, its economic value, is negligible compared to
> that of the original, and this notwithstanding the fact that they
> resemble each other like two drops of water (1899, 125-126, my
> trans.).




Lange holds, in other words, that one object of aesthetic admiration
and enjoyment is the relational event of artist *A* in
context *C* creating something sufficiently novel to provide an
audience with a certain type of pleasure. Lange explicitly insists
that the kind of value he has in mind is "in" the work,
but not an intrinsic feature of the (tokens of) the visually identical
image type.




As will become apparent below, the debate between monisms and their
rivals in the ontology of art continues.


## 3. What sorts of entities are works of art?




Philosophers who have asked themselves what sorts of things works of
art are have had recourse to a bewildering array of received and newly
postulated ontological categories. The following survey is not
exhaustive, but identifies some of the most prominent proposals
published in the period focused on in this entry.


### 3.1 Platonism and its critics




Platonism about works of art can be understood as the thesis that some
or even all works of art are abstract entities that have no
spatiotemporal location (for background, see the entry on platonism in
metaphysics). It is most common to conjoin a platonist account of
works in some art forms, such as music and literature, with a
different account, i.e. the physical object hypothesis, of works in
other art forms, such as painting and dance. Recent advocates of
platonism in the ontology of art include Peter Kivy (1983, 1987) and
Julian Dodd (2000, 2007, 2010). Noteworthy recent critiques of
platonist theses in the ontology of art include Stephen Davies (1993,
2003b, 2008), Predelli (1995, 2001), Saam Trivedi (2002), Andrew Kania
(2008a, 2008b, 2012), David Davies (2009a, 2009b), Marcus Rossberg
(2012), Chris Tillman (2011), and Gary Ostertag (2012).




Some of the objections to platonism in art ontology are versions of
longstanding criticisms of the postulation of abstract objects, such
as the objection that the instantiation relation between universals
and their particular manifestations leads to a regress, or is obscure
or inexplicable. Other objections are raised by philosophers who do
not reject all postulations of knowable abstract objects, but who
nonetheless find that works of art are not adequately classified as
such items.




One worry about platonism with regard to music runs as follows: if a
sound, and the hearing of a sound, are spatiotemporal events, and if a
musical work is an abstract type that has no spatiotemporal location
and that exists independently of particular performances of it, how
could it be literally true to say that a musical work has
such-and-such sounds? Do platonists about musical works have to accept
the conclusion that musical works are, strictly speaking, inaudible
(Davies 2009b)? Another worry concerns performances and their relation
to the abstract objects of which they are a performance: if a musical
work is a fully determinate abstract object, how could an
interpretative performance of it be *necessary* to its
appreciation (Predelli 1995, 2001)?


 

Rudner raised another objection that is often taken up in the
literature (e.g., Caplan and Matheson 2004). If a work such as
Beethoven's *Fifth Symphony* is an abstract entity, this
would have "as a counter-intuitive consequence a denial that
Beethoven created the *Fifth Symphony*" (1950, 385).




Here we encounter a paradox, or incoherent conjunction of thoughts
each of which has some intuitive appeal when examined separately. As
Kania (2008a, 22) and Cameron (2008, 295) put it in the context of
discussions of the ontology of musical works, the triad may be
specified as follows:



> 
> (A) Works of art are created.
>   
> 
> (B) Works of art are abstract objects.
>   
> 
> (C) Abstract objects cannot be created.
> 
> 




Many philosophers (e.g., Wolterstorff 1980, Kivy 1987, Currie 1989)
have thought that this paradox is best resolved by rejecting (A). For
others, such as Haig Khatchadourian (1960) and Renee Cox
(1985), (A) is true; works of art should be recognized as items that
come into existence and can be destroyed. Given this premise, which is
defended at length by Charles Nussbaum (2003), the trio may be
interpreted as a *reductio* of (B). Yet giving up on (B) would
seem to require us to overlook the obvious fact that we commonly speak
of a musical work as being repeatable. Cannot the same recorded song
be replayed on multiple occasions? Another strategy is to restore
coherence by revising only (C). Margaret MacDonald (1952-1953)
proposes that works are abstract types that are genuinely created by
the artist or author. Similarly, Thomasson argues that at least some
works of art (i.e., musical and literary works) are a kind of
"abstract artifact" meriting recognition as genuine
creations (1999, 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2010). Barry Smith (2008) also
argues for what he calls 'quasi-abstract patterns', which
like numbers are nonphysical and nonpsychological, but which are tied,
through the actions of agents, to a time and historical
context. Anthony Ralls (1972) characterizes works as created
universals concretely embodied through the intentional activities of
artists. Peter Alward (2004) contends that the paradox is generated by
inappropriate assumptions about types, and that genuine artistic
creation is compatible with a continuant/stage model of works and
performances. Lee Walters (2013) argues for a solution to the paradox
based on the thesis that works are created types. He responds to an
array of objections to this approach, including those advanced in
Allan Hazlett (2012).


### 3.2 Type-token distinctions




Many philosophers who have sought to say what sorts of entities works
of art are have spoken of 'types' and
'tokens', an idiom which can be traced back to Charles
Sanders Peirce (1931-1958, IV, para. 537, 423). (For background,
including a discussion of Peirce's statements on the topic, see the
entry on types and tokens.) One idea that some art ontologists have
found promising is that as a special sort of abstraction, types have
features that should be kept in mind as we seek to solve the paradox
of creation and other vexed issues, such as the question of how a work
of art can have particular perceptible qualities if it is an
imperceptible abstract object. As becomes apparent below, however, the
conclusions on this score have been quite diverse.




Although Wollheim has at times wrongly been credited with this move,
the earliest explicit reference to the type-token distinction in the
literature on the ontology of art is to be found in Rudner
(1950). Subsequent philosophers who have discussed applications of
type-token distinctions in the philosophy of art include Charles
Stevenson (1957, 1958), Meager (1958-59) Margolis (1958, 1959,
1961), W. D. L. Scobie (1960), Wacker (1960), Khatchadourian (1960),
Ruth Saw (1961), Donald F. Henze (1957, 1961), Jay E. Bacharach
(1971), Nigel Harrison (1975), R. A. Sharpe (1979, 1995, 2001),
Rossberg (2012), and Davies (2012).




Rudner brought up the type-token distinction in the context of a
critique of Lewis's (1946) idea that a work of art is a
contextualized abstract entity. Rudner conjectured that what Lewis had
in mind in talking about the relationship between an abstract entity
and its renditions or instances was the type-token relation. This
conjecture makes sense given that Lewis was one of the first American
philosophers to read his way through the Peircean *Nachlass*,
which he found stored in cartons in the first office he was assigned
at Harvard. Lewis indeed refers to Peirce at times in his (1946), but
he did not endorse Peirce's theses about the nature of types; nor did
Lewis use the idiom of types and tokens in the passages where he tried
to identify what he took to be the special character of the relations
between aesthetic essences and their concrete vehicles, one of his
main proposals being that some kinds of works of art depend more than
others on concrete objects.




Stevenson (1957) reached for a type/token distinction in an attempt to
disambiguate the intuitively appealing idea that a poem is a written
or spoken sequence of words. 'Word', Stevenson notes, is
ambiguous between the particular instance or token and the type of
word. While he finds it tempting to rule that the poem is the type (of
word sequence), Stevenson considers this to be incompatible with
ordinary discourse about literature, as when we use the title of a
work to refer to a particular token, saying "Please hand me
*Paradise Lost*." Stevenson considers it best to
allow that the work is either a type or a token, leaving the task of
disambiguation to context-sensitive usage. He explicitly rejects
Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's (1942) Ingarden-inspired
thesis that a work is an abstract item, namely a stratified system of
norms. In order to accommodate the idea that meaning is also
essential to the kind of thing a poem is, Stevenson uses the term
'megatype' to pick out classes of word sequences having the
same meaning, so that a poem is identifiable as a megatype.
Megatypes, he would appear to believe, are ultimately reducible to
"a special kind of physical object or event" (1958, 41 n.
2), but it is not clear how this analysis will proceed: is the
conjunction of a meaningful text type and the text types of all of its
past, present, and future faithful translations a physical object or
event?




In an extended criticism of particularist accounts of the
individuation and evaluation of works, Meager characterizes a work as
either a spatiotemporal object or performance that manifests a pattern
of elements that is the product of a person's (or group of
persons') activity, where the activity was not a matter of
copying or servile imitation, and where the object or performance is
evaluated non-instrumentally. The concept of a work of art, she
comments, "operates in a rather special way as a universal
defined by a spatio-temporal particular, which may itself therefore be
regarded as a type-universal" (1958-59, 59). According to
Meager, the identity of the individual artist is not a factor of work
individuation: should two different persons independently author poems
that happen to consist in the same sequence of words, they have
independently authored the same work, even if their motives,
intentions, and contexts are strikingly different.




Turning now to Wollheim's influential application of a
type-token distinction (1968, 1980), what is most noteworthy about his
articulation of the idea that at least some works of art are best
categorized as types is the reason he gives for saying that types are
different from other "generic entities," and in
particular, universals. The relation between a type and its tokens is,
according to Wollheim, "more intimate" than the relation
between a universal (e.g., a property) and its instances. Whereas the
property *being white* is not itself white, all and only those
properties that a token has by virtue of its being a token of a given
type are "transmitted" to that type as well: as no bit of
cloth that is not rectangular can be a correctly formed token of the
type *The Union Jack*, it follows that the property of being
rectangular also belongs to the type *The Union Jack*. This
idea is endorsed by Oswald Hanfling (1992, 80-82), Linda Wetzel
(2009), and others.




This contention about the "more intimate" relation between
types, tokens, and their instantiations of properties leaves one to
wonder how Wollheim conceived of both universals and types. Unlike
Peirce, he does not hold that the existence of a type depends on that
of at least one token; Wollheim seems inclined to accept types as a
species of autonomously existing abstract object. Yet if any item that
instantiates the property *rectangular* must be spatial, and if
every token of *The Union Jack* instantiates that property,
then it follows from Wollheim's claim that *The Union
Jack* is, *qua* type, rectangular. It would appear to
follow from this that the type must be a concrete, spatially located
entity, since anything that can literally be rectangular must be
located in space. Yet one of the main reasons for going in for the
theory of types in the first place was Peirce's basic
observation that while token word inscriptions of 'the'
have their times and places, the word *the*, *qua* type,
has no location. Is it sound to postulate the existence of an
autonomous abstraction having spatial or temporal features?




Reicher (1998) acknowledges that if works are types, they cannot
literally have spatiotemporal properties. With the aim of providing a
more accurate restatement of ordinary talk about the perceptible
qualities of works, she distinguishes between two different modes of
predication. In an example of a first mode of predication, someone
says 'the table is rectangular'. This is contrasted to a
different mode whereby we say, for example, 'this work of art is
determined as [*ist bestimmt als*] rectangular'. If a
work of art has been determined as rectangular, then every realization
of the work is rectangular. We can perceive a work's
realizations, as these are concrete objects or actions, but strictly
speaking, we apprehend [*erfassen*] but do not perceive the
type itself. (For background on this approach, see the entry on
nonexistent objects.)




Guy Rohrbaugh (2003) argues that even in the case of repeatable works
such as photographs, the category of types does not adequately capture
at least three fundamental features of works of art: temporality (they
come into existence and can cease to exist), temporal flexibility
(some of their qualities can change over time), and modal flexibility
(a work could have had properties other than those it actually
has). According to Rohrbaugh, type theories cannot accommodate this
kind of modal flexibility. He proposes instead that works of art
should be conceived of as historical individuals that persist through
time.


### 3.3 Norm-kinds




Wolsterstorff complains that Wollheim's thesis about the sharing
of properties among types and their tokens gives us "no
illumination" with respect to the pattern of such sharing (1975,
239). Artistic types and their tokens cannot have all and only the
same properties. For this reason Wolterstorff turns to a kind of
"analogous predication" in which properties attributed to
the token are analogously attributed to the type. Suppose a
performance or instance of a work has the prescribed or indicated
property, P. The analogous property of the work (*qua* type or
kind) is the property: being such that something cannot be a correct
or proper example of the work without having the property of being
P. Shifting to the terminology of 'kinds' and
'examples', Wolterstorff focuses on properties that are
necessary to "properly formed" examples of a kind, where
the kind in question is a "norm-kind" that can (but need
not) have both improperly and properly formed instances. For example,
some seriously flawed attempts to play a difficult piece by Chopin are
nonetheless performances of that work, even though they lack qualities
that a proper or a good instance of the work would have. This proposal
is meant to accommodate the many cases where significantly different
artistic and aesthetic properties figure within the occurrences or
performances of one and the same work (on this theme, see also Walton
1977).




Wolterstorff accepts the thesis that works of art neither come into
nor go out of existence (1980, 88-89). A kind, *K*, exists
if and only if the correlated property, *k*, exists. With regard
to the existence of properties, Wolterstorff's initial view
(1970) was that for any property, *being-f*, this property
exists just in case either something is-*f* or something is
not-*f*. Criticisms (John Perry 1974) involving Russell's
paradox of unexemplified properties led him to qualify this
"general predicate entailment principle."




Wolterstorff holds that the sequences of sounds and words of which
musical and literary works are made up exist everlastingly. What the
artist does in creating a work, then, is to make it the case that a
"preexistent kind becomes *a work*--specifically, a
work *of his*" (1980, 89). Wolterstorff's idea,
then, is that a composer can select but not create a sound pattern or
type of sound-occurrence. Although the latter is an entity that
already exists, it is not a musical work unless some composer has
determined and perhaps recorded its correctness conditions
*qua* work. Wolterstorff remarks that the composing of a
musical work is similar to the inventing of a game (1980, 63).


### 3.4 Capacities, artifacts, and actions



One family of views on the ontological status of works of art finds
its orientation in a longstanding conception of the arts in
general. The word 'art' derives from the Latin
'ars', which is often taken as translating the Greek term
'techne', which covered various sorts of practical
capacities or powers. The word derived from the Indo-European root
'tek', meaning to put together the woodwork of a house; a
'tekton' was a carpenter (Angier 2010, 1). Carpentry is
something that cannot be done without some skill, and to become good
at the art of carpentry requires training and practice. To exercise an
art or craft is to activate a power to bring things about that
otherwise would not have happened. In this vein Aristotle declares in
his *Metaphysics* that "all arts, i.e. all productive
forms of knowledge are potentialities; they are principles of change
in another thing or in the artist himself considered as other"
(*Met.* 1046a36-1046b4). In *Nicomachean Ethics*
he remarks that "since building is an art and is essentially a
reasoned state of capacity to make, and there is neither any art that
is not such a state nor such a state that is not an art), *art*
is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course
of reasoning" (*Nic. Eth.*, 1140a6-1140a11).



That the arts are a matter of the rational production and judgement of
artifacts was widely accepted by medieval thinkers (for background,
see Eco 1988, 164-165). For example, in the discussion of
iconoclasm and idolatry in the *Opus Caroli regis contra
synodum* (ca. 794), Theodulf of Orleans characterized
pictures as *manufacta* (Noble 2009, 227, 347). Claims of this
sort stood in opposition to Byzantine beliefs in such things
as *acheiropoeitoi*, or miraculous sacred images not created by
mortal hands.


 

No doubt with Aristotle in mind, in his *Summa Theologica*
(1912, I-II, 57, 4c) Thomas Aquinas defined 'art' as right reason in
the making of things (*ars est recta ratio factibilium*). In
(1744, 7) James Harris identified art as "an habitual power in
man of becoming the cause of some effect, according to a system of
various and well-approved precepts." Kant in turn identified a
work or *opus* as the product of a doing [*Tun*]
(*facere*), to which he contrasted the effects of nature, such
as a beehive. Only what is the product of the exercise of a capacity
to choose [*eine Willkur*] is art (2000 [1790], 182-183,
paragraph 43). (For commentary on Kant's definitions of art and
fine art, see Paul Guyer 1997.) Bolzano's (1849) essay on the
nature and classification of works of art similarly begins with an
emphasis on the necessity of the artist's intentional activity
to the creation of a work. Various philosophers have more recently
classified works of art (or at least some works of fine art) as
artifacts; examples include Marcia Eaton (1969), Gary Iseminger
(1973), Denis Dutton (1979), Risto Hilpinen (1992, 1993), Thomasson
(1999), and Levinson (2007) (for background, see the entry on
artifacts). The next section is devoted to Levinson's influential
proposal.


#### 3.4.1 Works of art as indicated structures



Levinson advocates a "contextualism" in aesthetics (2005),
which is not to be confounded with the approach defended by Pepper
(1937a, 1968, 1970) under the same label. In his (1980a, 1990)
Levinson sets forth and defends an account of "paradigm musical
works," i.e. fully notated compositions within Western
culture. His proposal is motivated by the attempt to meet what he
takes to be three salient requirements on an adequate ontology of
works of this sort: creatability, fine individuation, and the
inclusion of performance means.




The first requirement specifies that "Musical works must be such
that they do not exist prior to the composer's compositional activity,
but are brought into existence by that activity" (1980,
68). Like Wolterstorff, Levinson allows that all possible sound-types,
and patterns and sequences thereof, preexist anyone's compositional
activities. The creatability requirement must be compatible with this
assumption, he maintains. The claim is not, then, that composers can
bring musical structures into existence; what they can do, however, is
"indicate" a structural type along with a performance
means or manner of generating instances or tokens of sound sequences
of that type. A musical work is, then, a relational entity of the sort
"sound structure and performance-means as indicated by
artist *X* at time *t*.". This sort of abstract
item, Levinson writes, "does not preexist the activity of
composition and is thus capable of being created" (1980a, 79;
cf. John Andrew Fisher 1991). Entities of this sort, it seems, only
come into existence through the actual event of indication performed
by a person (or persons) in some context. Terms figuring alongside
'indicate' in Levinson's descriptions of what the artist
does with the abstract object include 'discover',
'choose', and 'demonstrate' (1990). Levinson
says more about how he understands the difference between ordinary and
artistic indication in his (2012).




Levinson's fine individuation requirement springs from the intuition
that if two composers were to indicate the same sound-structure, they
would not thereby generate the same musical work. The contrary
intuition had been forwarded by Meager (1958-59, 57-58) and
Wolterstorff (1975, 248); it was criticized in Walton (1977) and
Savile (1971). Levinson entertains the possibility that the identity
of the composer is not essential to the individuation of works;
perhaps it is at least logically possible for a work to be composed by
a person other than the one who actually did so. Levinson explores the
thesis that something like sameness of musical-historical context is a
constraint sufficient to satisfy the requirement of fine-grained
individuation.



Levinson proposes, then, that some musical works may be classified as
"initiated types," that is, types that are brought into
being by an intentional action of indication performed upon a pure
structure. With regard to works of visual art, Levinson (1996) defends
the idea that at least some such works are physical objects as
intended by the artist for a certain regard or treatment. The work is
the relational entity comprised of the object or structure and the
artist's action in a context.



Currie objects that Levinson's ontological category, structure as
indicated-by-artist at time *t*, is metaphysically obscure
(1989, 58). Fleming discovered penicillin, but do we believe that in
so doing he also created the entity,
penicillin-as-discovered-by-Fleming? Levinson is explicitly committed
to the idea that when the artist indicates or discovers or chooses an
abstract structure, "something further comes into
existence," namely, an initiated type (1990, 262). Currie's
point is that if this is allowed, various unwanted ontological
commitments follow. A related criticism raised by Dodd (2000),
Predelli (2001), and Alward (2004) is that indicating is not really a
matter of creating, and if this is correct, it follows that Levinson's
proposal does not satisfy a sufficiently robust version of the first
of his three requirements on an adequate ontology of the relevant
sorts of works.



Currie also raises the objection that Levinson's account does not
individuate works adequately; this objection has been further pursued
by David Davies (2004), and by Matheson and Caplan (2007). Lamarque
(2010) contends that there is an indeterminacy as to which tokens are
of a given indicated type.



In response to James Anderson's (1985) suggestion that Levinson's
proposal could be amplified with reference to Wolterstorff's ideas
about norm-kinds, Levinson (1990) expresses reservations about the
latter, but adds that the notion that the artist makes certain
features normative for a work helps to explain in what indicating a
structure consists.


#### 3.4.2 Artworks as actions



Various philosophers have explored the idea that works should be
classified as actions or performances as opposed to the products or
objects that may result from such actions. Croce, Collingwood, and
Dewey are early and highly influential examples. In a remarkable
review of Dewey's aesthetics, Croce makes a list of familiar
ideas to be found in Dewey's work. One of these ideas, which he
says was formulated much earlier in Italy, is that "there are
not artistic 'things', but only an artistic doing, an
artistic producing" (1948, 205). Jeffrey Maitland (1975)
similarly suggests that the work of art is a "doing", but
also declares that a work is a "performative presence."
Denis Dutton writes that "As performances, works of art
represent the ways in which artists solve problems, overcome
obstacles, make do with available materials." (1979, 305). He
adds in the same context that "the work of art has a human
origin, and must be understood as such."




Sparshott (1980, 1982) conceives of a work as a performance, and more
specifically, as an action when it is conceived in a certain way,
namely, as the establishment of a design. Work identity is determined
by both the nature of this design and the type of action that yielded
it: same design and origin, same work. Sparshott's evocation of
a unity of outcome and agency is complicated, however, by the fact
that he thinks in terms of reconstructed or idealized, nonfactual
artistic intentions, as opposed to the actual intentions and actions
of the artist or artists responsible for the production of a
"system of qualities."




Currie (1989) proposes that all artworks belong to the category of
action types. Works are types of events, then, and events are said by
Currie to be a "natural ontological category." Although
Currie says he wants to stay neutral on issues pertaining to the
nature and individuation of events, he at least provisionally works
with Jaegwon Kim's (1976) conception of events as property
exemplifications by an object or substance (or ordered *n*-tuple
of objects/substances) at a time. As types, works could not themselves
literally be events, and Currie's event-types are individuated
in ways that abstract from the "constitutive substance"
figuring within Kim's basically Aristotelian perspective on
events.




More specifically, Currie's proposal is that a work is an action
type of the form: an agent, *A*, discovers a structure, *s*,
via a heuristic path, *H*, at a time, *t*.




Currie allows that the artist does not create the work of art. Nor
does the artist discover it. The artist can discover a preexisting
abstract artistic structure, but the work is an action type that the
artist "performs" in so doing.




Currie explains that the heuristic path is the "way in which the
artist arrived at the final product." Neither a particular agent
nor a specific time is essential to the action type that is the work
of art: someone else could discover the same structure at a different
time yet instantiate the same work. Currie conjectures, for example,
that if "Picasso's twin on 'Twin Earth'
produces a canvas indistinguishable from
Picasso's *Guernica*, and if he does so in the same way,
then *Guernica* and *Twin Guernica* are instances of the
same work" (1989, 9). Currie also introduces a similar
conjecture involving Beethoven, twin Beethoven, and twin tokens of the
Hammerklavier sonata.




Wolterstorff (1992) and Levinson (1992) complain that a
counterintuitive implication of Currie's proposal is that one
cannot read a literary work. Levinson (1992) takes up the question of
work individuation and asks whether Beethoven and twin Beethoven
really make the same works, even though they act within qualitatively
identical cultures and come up with tokens of the same artistic
structure via qualitatively identical paths.




Questions have been raised (e.g., by Levinson 1992 and David Davies
2004) about Currie's Lakatos-inspired notion of the
artist's heuristic path, beginning with the obvious query as to
what is and is not included in the "way" the artist
discovers the structure. Currie allows that the path can include facts
unknown to the artist if they are deemed relevant to the appreciation
of his or her achievement. For example, even if Virginia Woolf did not
know of Marcel Proust's work when she wrote *Jacob's
Room*, she could "in principle" have known about it,
and so Proust's prior inventions were part of her path and are
relevant to our understanding of Woolf's achievement. Currie
acknowledges that his notion of a heuristic path is vague, and he
entertains the possibility that describing the heuristic of a work
"starts to look like writing the history of the universe"
(1989, 72). Yet he optimistically predicts that there "will be
wide agreement about how the idea is to be applied in particular
cases" (1989, 73). More specifically, he indicates that
"case studies" in the analysis of such heuristics can be
found in Michael Baxandall's (1985).




In his proposal for an alternative to contextualist ontologies of art,
David Davies (2004, 2005) proposes that works of art are best
classified, not as indicated structures or as action types, but as
action tokens. A work of art, then, is a 'doing' or
generative performance. Davies further analyzes the latter as a
sequence of "motivated manipulations of a vehicular medium
through which a particular focus of appreciation is specified"
(2005a, 75). With regard to the bedeviled question of which factors in
the historical context of a work's creation do and do not
determine the identity of the work (a question that is taken to be
distinct from the question as to which factors are in some broad sense
relevant to the work's understanding and appreciation), Davies
identifies what he calls the artist's "primary
motivation," which governs activities that specify an artistic
vehicle that articulates a given artistic content. It is these
art-content-articulating manipulations of artistic vehicles that
qualify as elements in the performance that is identified with the
work. For example, whether an artist's intentional ingestion of
a drug during the making of the "focus of appreciation" or
product of the generative performance is to be counted as part of the
work depends, then, on whether this action is part of a manipulation
of an artistic vehicle effectively designed to articulate some aspect
of the work's content.




Dilworth (2005b) objects that Davies's basic contention to the
effect that works are action tokens is incompatible with his claim
that works, conceived of as a particular generative performance, have
a kind of "modal flexibility," which means that the same
work could have had different properties (e.g., it could have been
created a few minutes earlier or later, or in a significantly
different art-historical context). Davies argues that his performance
theory, unlike such rivals as the indicated structure theory, is
compatible with a *work-relative* modality. For an informative
discussion of this topic, see Matheson and Caplan (2008).




Some critics of Davies' account (Kania 2005, Stecker 2005) contend
that he provides insufficient grounds for the adoption of a highly
revisionary ontological doctrine that gives the lie to countless
ordinary statements about works of art, such as "the
*Mona Lisa* can be seen at the Louvre." This criticism
echoes Mary McCarthy's remark in response to Harold
Rosenberg's proposal that action paintings are not pictures but
"events": "You cannot hang an event on a wall, only
a picture" (Rosenberg 1962, 5). Davies (or the proponent of any
other ontological account that is incompatible with prevalent
pronouncements in ordinary language) may respond that the
philosopher's goal is not to ratify all casual and unreflective
utterances about the arts, but to articulate a cogent (and possibly
revisionary) metaphysics. Davies in fact contends that his proposal is
meant to obey a "pragmatic constraint" to the effect that
"Artworks must be conceived ontologically in such a way as to
accord with those features of our critical and appreciative practice
upheld on rational reflection" (2004, 23). This constraint is
part of a larger argument that also rests on the following
"epistemological" premise: "Rational reflection upon
our critical and appreciative practice confirms that certain sorts of
properties, actual or modal, are rightly ascribed to what are termed
'works' in that practice, or that our practice rightly
individuates what are termed 'works' in a certain
way" (2004, 23).




Stecker (2009) argues that Davies's epistemological argument
does not justify settling on the performance theory or any of the
other rival ontological proposals. Stecker holds that the pragmatic,
referential core of our talk about musical works requires them to be
audible, repeatable, and performable. This finding, he contends, is
compatible with contextualism, but not with Davies's own
proposal.




Given that the practices in the spheres of art are contradictory,
changing, and influenced by cacophonous theorizing, the practices
alone cannot tell us which aspects of practice are and are not
indicative of reliable answers to art-ontological
queries. Consequently it is fair to ask how a philosopher's rational
reflection on practice can lead to accurate answers to art-ontological
questions (Livingston 2005b). Two salient issues in this regard are
how sufficient evidence about art-related attitudes and behavior is to
be gathered by philosophers, and how this evidence can be interpreted
in such a manner that it provides reliable support for general
ontological claims. Art-ontologists need a reliable, principled method
with which to select and interpret the practices that are meant to
support their theories.