Prominent philosophical accounts of artistic forgery have neglected a central aspect of the aesthetic harm it perpetrates. To be properly understood, forgery must be seen in the context of our ongoing attempts to augment our aesthetic understanding in conditions of uncertainty. The bootstrapping necessary under these conditions requires a highly refined comprehension of historical context. By creating artificial associations among aesthetically relevant qualities and misrepresenting historical relationships, undetected forgeries stunt or distort aesthetic understanding. The effect of this may (...) be quite pervasive, and removing known forgeries from museum walls will be insufficient to eradicate it. Continued attention to forgeries, once exposed, can in fact serve us by increasing our understanding of how aesthetic understanding is formed and by helping us to repair the damage they have inflicted. (shrink)

How to Forge a Musical Work’, I argue that the best way to view an attempted forgery of a lost autograph that accidentally duplicates the lost original is as a ‘version’, not a ‘forgery’, although I acknowledge the plausibility of Jerrold Levinson's alternate view, that it remains a forgery nevertheless. John Dilworth, in his article, ‘A Representational Theory of Artefacts and Artworks’, defends Levinson's ‘intuition’ against mine. In the present article I argue that our ‘intuitions’ here are (...) divided, as they are in the case of fictional literary works that accidentally turn out to be ‘true’, where some would say that what we have is still ‘fiction’, others that it is ‘accidental history’. (shrink)

Gadamer insists that we can never abandon our own ‘horizon’ and transpose ourselves into or reconstruct an artist’s historical context, and re-experience a work’s original meaning. Our context-bound values and beliefs, or prejudgments, are a necessary condition for all understanding, but we can become aware of them in the attempt to understand works of art of the past, and achieve a fusion of horizons. But what of contemporary forgeries of artworks from the past, produced by someone sharing our own horizon? (...) Forgers tend to exaggerate the qualities or properties of a work that their generation particularly appreciates. Only when interpreters are able to recognize the forger’s prejudgments, which render his work different from that of the horizon he seeks to imitate, does the true meaning of the forger’s work become apparent, as – famously – in the case of Van Meegeren’s imitations of ‘Vermeers.’ Contemporary forgeries are a good test of whether we are able to recognize our prejudgments. (shrink)

The article attempts refute recent arguments that the historical context in which an artwork is produced is relevant to its aesthetic value. These arguments claim that forgeries are intrinsically less aesthetically valuable than originals because forgeries lack the appropriate relation to the past. These arguments fail because demanding an "appropriate" historical context of a work for it to be aesthetically respectable confuses aesthetic merit with artistic merit, A work's significance within its culture and the history of art.

Peter Lamarque, in chapter 4 of his 2010 book Work and Object, argues that certain artworks, like musical scores and literary texts, are such that there can be no forgeries of them that purport to be of an actually existing work—what Lamarque calls “referential forgeries”. Lamarque motivates this claim via appeal to another distinction, first made by Goodman, between “allographic” and “autographic” artworks. This article will evaluate Lamarque’s argument that allographic literary works are unable to be referentially forged and will (...) find them wanting. In so doing, the distinction between allographic and autographic artworks (and therefore artforms) will be called into question. In section I, I characterize referential forgery and Lamarque’s definition of allographic and autographic artforms. Section II critically examines Lamarque’s argument against the possibility of referential forgery in allographic artforms. Section III offers a case where it appears that a putatively allographic text’s type membership is sensitive to facts about its causal-intentional provenance. This case serves as pretext for Section IV’s identification of this causal-intentional relation with the sanctioning relation as formulated by Sherri Irvin. On the basis of considerations treated in sections I through IV, section V questions the tenability of the allographic/autographic distinction. -/- . (shrink)

I examine three themes central to Denis Dutton’s philosophy of art. To understand the artworks of non-Western cultures, we must understand how to identify what artistic category these works in fact belong to. Though the perceived properties of a work of art do not seem to change when it is revealed to be a forgery, there is a reason why forgeries are “artistic crimes.” In both cases, a “work of art” is not simply the object produced (the painting, for (...) example), but rather the contextualized performance undertaken by the artist that brings about the finished product. (shrink)

A work of Vietnamese art crossed a million-dollar mark in the international art market in early 2017. The event was reluctantly seen as a sign of maturity from the Vietnamese art amidst the many existing problems. Even though the Vietnamese media has discussed the issues enthusiastically, there is a lack of literature from the Vietnamese academics examining the subject, and even rarer in from the market perspective. This paper aims to contribute an insightful perspective on the Vietnamese art market, and (...) hesitantly the Vietnamese art as well, through the lens of fake, forgery and copy artworks. 35 cases of fake, forgery and copy paintings were found on the news and from the experts' wisdom. Through the examples, we argue that the Vietnamese art market is a temporary reaction to the immaturely rising of the Vietnamese art and the economy. Therefore, the art market is unable to function healthily unless the Vietnamese art and the economy developed. (shrink)

Appropriation art has often been thought to support the view that authorship in art is an outmoded or misguided notion. Through a thought experiment comparing appropriation art to a unique case of artistic forgery, I examine and reject a number of candidates for the distinction that makes artists the authors of their work while forgers are not. The crucial difference is seen to lie in the fact that artists bear ultimate responsibility for whatever objectives they choose to pursue through (...) their work, whereas the forger's central objectives are determined by the nature of the activity of forgery. Appropriation artists, by revealing that no aspect of the objectives an artist pursues are in fact built in to the concept of art, demonstrate artists' responsibility for all aspects of their objectives and, hence, of their products. This responsibility is constitutive of authorship and accounts for the interpretability of artworks. Far from undermining the concept of authorship in art, then, the appropriation artists in fact reaffirm and strengthen it. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes discuss cases of forgery and appropriation in art as similar but contrasting examples to understand issues relevant to the artistic value of artworks (Irvin 2005, Hick 2010). Something interesting about these cases is that both in forgeries and in ‘appropriation art’, we find works that can look very similar, and yet, deserve different value judgements or are actually evaluated differently. Moreover, despite the similarity of the cases, the philosophical analysis of what justifies different evaluations in the case (...) of forgeries and appropriation art provides different conclusions in each case. I propose a third contrasting example: a case of cultural (mis)appropriation exemplified by what I will call the Chiapas tote bag and a questionably fancier doppelgänger. (shrink)

I argue that Dilworth has not shown the type / token theory of film identity to be non-viable, since there is no reason to think that a single object cannot be a token of two types. Even if we assume a single inheritance view of types, Dilworth's argument runs into other problems. Dilworth does not provide any convincing argument as to why intentions are necessary for identifying film and why production history alone will not suffice for identifying hardly conceivable forgeries. (...) Intention is not necessary for distinguishing between fakes and the real thing, nor is it necessary to differentiate between two artworks with the same token. Moreover, taking the notion of intentions into consideration leads to a splintering problem. I propose that production history, presentation, and non-numerical template identity suffice to identify a film on a multiple inheritance type / token theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Production Determines CategoryAn Ontology of ArtMichael Weh (bio)1. Are There Singular Artworks?It is a mainstream view within the ontology of art that there are singular as well as multiple artworks, but it is also a view that is contested. In what follows, I will investigate whether the singular/multiple distinction can be sustained and will argue for a new way to determine the category to which an artwork belongs. (...) Though this seems to be an enterprise of rather theoretical concern, it has a direct practical dimension to it as well. Whether we are right to distinguish between singular and multiple artworks, and on what grounds such a distinction could be made, is of course affecting our treatment of artworks and our whole practice of exhibiting, selling, and appreciating works of art because it is based on the assumption that certain works are unique (and thus exhibited in museums and sold for considerable prices), whereas others exist in several instances (which make them widely available and not to be identified with a single object of appreciation). I hope to show that our practice of categorizing art is mostly appropriate but for different reasons than it has been suggested before.The first question to consider is, What defines a singular artwork? The most obvious characteristic is that it is singular—that is, it exists in only one instance. There is only one Mona Lisa, and there cannot be multiple instances of the Mona Lisa, whereas there can be multiple instances of Ulysses. But a little more precision is advisable. The criterion to decide whether a given work is singular cannot be if there actually is just one instance of the work.1 There might be a multiple artwork, say the novel x, of which there is only one instance—the manuscript. But this does not make x a singular artwork because there could be many copies of x, and they would all be instances of x if they fulfilled the necessary identity criteria between type and token.A copy of the Mona Lisa, on the other hand, would not—according to the common understanding of "singular artworks"—be an instance of the [End Page 84] painting but just that: a copy of the Mona Lisa. Thus, a singular artwork can only exist in one exemplar, and it is impossible that there is more than one. There can only be copies, reproductions, posters, forgeries, facsimiles, or pictures of the Mona Lisa but not an exemplar of the Mona Lisa other than the original. Talking of one exemplar or instance of the Mona Lisa might even be slightly misleading, as it is not supposed to suggest that there is some abstract entity Mona Lisa of which Leonardo's painting is the one and only possible instance. The claim is rather that in the case of singular artworks, there is no type the painting would be a token of at all but only the original physical object. The original is the work.The view that paintings and sculptures are singular artworks that are to be identified with physical objects is held by many ontologists of art, including Richard Wollheim, Jerrold Levinson, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The view is not unchallenged, however, and some people think that what would normally be considered as singular artworks can—at least in principle—exist in several instances as well. In other words, there are no singular artworks at all. And if there could be several instances of the Mona Lisa, this not only means that the Mona Lisa is not a singular work of art but also that it is not a physical object; rather, it is an abstract object like a literary or musical work.2 This view is defended by, amongst others, Gregory Currie, Maria Reicher, and Peter Strawson.But let us first look at some reasons why one might want to insist that some artworks are concrete particulars. To begin with, this is how we deal with and think about paintings and sculptures. The assumption that, say, paintings are singular artworks is implied in our social practices concerning paintings. We put the originals in museums and not copies of them. We buy and... (shrink)

Guiding you through the topics that shape aesthetics, this introduction explores the truth, meaning, taste, aesthetic merit and the role of perception. Each chapter offers a wealth of examples from Asia, including Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Tan Tai Yong, Kueh Appreciation Day and dragon kiln pottery. They deal with controversies and address central questions, such as: When are artworks considered dangerous? Why does Socrates recommend the banishment of the poets? What are the problems and challenges (...) posed by forgery? Here is a creative and accessible introduction that inspires a love for art and aesthetics. (shrink)

In this review article, I present and discuss some theories and arguments which we can find in Derek Matravers’s opinonated textbook on the philosophy of art. Texbook consists of an introduction and eight chapters, but only some of the most important claims are discussed: various theories and definitions of art, the notions of expression and value of art and artworks, as well as the question whether we can learn something from artworks, beside, of course, what is considered as artistic and (...) aesthetic. A little more emphasize I gave on the notions of forgeries and on the concept of beauty in connection with the artworks. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss cases of replication in the visual arts, with particular focus on paintings. In the first part, I focus on painted copies, that is, manual reproductions of paintings created by artists. Painted copies are sometimes used for the purpose of aesthetic education on the original. I explore the relation between the creation of painted copies and their use as aesthetic surrogates of the original artwork and draw a positive conclusion on the aesthetic benefits of replica (...) production by artists. A skeptical conclusion follows regarding the use of such replicas as surrogates for the original painting. The second part of the paper concerns mechanically produced replicas, such as photographs and 3-D prints. On the basis of some of the claims made in the first part, I set conditions that mechanically produced replicas need to meet in order to function as aesthetic surrogates of an original. I argue that perfect aesthetic surrogates are either already available or at least possible. I conclude by considering two possible objections. (shrink)

Wittgenstein asserts that aesthetic responses are not causal. They name the objects or targets of feelings rather than their causes, and are not open to experimental revision. One cannot break the object down into distinct components and match particular parts to the response. Changing a work of art produces an entirely new object and a new response; changing so much as a word in a text changes its meaning and effect. But many critics do respond to expressive, affective or connotative (...) aspects of particular words (and contemplate ‘merely’ stylistic changes), and our response to artworks can change even without the work changing, such as when we learn who the author is, or that a painting is a forgery. Critics can identify the targets of their aesthetic responses, which makes their responses causal hypotheses, although these are valid only for the particular critic and the particular occasion, and do not rest on any causal aesthetic norms. (shrink)

The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying responds to the rapidly changing attitudes towards the use of another's ideas, styles, and artworks. With advances in technology making the copying of artworks and other artefacts exponentially easier, questions of copying no longer focus on the problems of forgery: they now expand into aesthetic and ethical legal concerns. This volume addresses the changes and provides the first philosophical foundation for an aesthetics and ethics of copying. Scholars from philosophy of art, philosophy of (...) technology, philosophy of law, ethics, legal theory, media studies, art history, literary theory, and sociology discuss the role that copying plays in human culture, confronting the question of how-and why-copying fits into our broader system of values. Teasing out the factors and conceptual distinctions that must be accounted for in an ontology of copying, they set a groundwork for understanding the nature of copies and copying, showing how these interweave with ethical and legal concepts. Covering unique concerns for copying in the domain of artworks, from music and art to plays and literature, contributors look at work by artists including Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Rauschenberg, Courbet and Manet and conclude with the normative dimensions of copying in the twenty-first century. By bringing this topic into the philosophical domain and highlighting its philosophical relevance, The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying establishes the complex conditions-ontological, aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and legal-that underlie and complicate the topic. The result is a timely collection that establishes the need for further discussion. (shrink)

This paper investigates feasible ways of destroying artworks, assuming they are abstract objects, or works of a particular art-form, where the works of at least this art-form are assumed to be abstracta. If artworks are eternal, mind-independent abstracta, and hence discovered, rather than created, then they cannot be destroyed, but merely forgotten. For more moderate conceptions of artworks as abstract objects, however, there might be logical space for artwork destruction. Artworks as abstracta have been likened to impure sets (i.e., (...) sets of concrete things, as opposed to pure sets, i.e., sets of nothing but other sets) that have a beginning in time, namely when their members come into being, and an end in time, namely when their members cease to exist. Alternatively, artworks as abstracta have been thought of as types that are created with their first token. Artwork destruction is harder on this account: merely destroying every token might not yet destroy the type. To what extent such similes can be spelt out and made plausible as an ontology of artworks, and what options there are on the different accounts for artwork destruction, is explored in this paper. (shrink)

Forgery in eighteenth-century London was more than a crime of opportunity; it completely undermined the economic, social and political orders of that society. Using the works of authors such as Randall McGowen, John Beattie, Craig Muldrew, and others, this paper examines cases tried in the London Old Bailey from 1700- 1740 in the context of the financial revolution and the rise of the bloody code. The paper looks at the implications this crime had on the greater London society, the (...) changes in legislation that came about as a result of forgery, and the changes in punishment for the crime. Ultimately, it examines at the reasons for the radical change in people‟s perception of this crime in such a short time period. (shrink)

I argue that there is no distinction between allographic and autographic representations. One consequence of this is that replicative forgeries have the same aesthetic and artistic value as originals, and are accurate records of actions. I end with some reflections on the pragmatic structure of forgery.

This paper examines people's reasoning about identity continuity and its relation to previous research on how people value one-of-a-kind artifacts, such as artwork. We propose that judgments about the continuity of artworks are related to judgments about the continuity of individual persons because art objects are seen as physical extensions of their creators. We report a reanalysis of previous data and the results of two new empirical studies that test this hypothesis. The first study demonstrates that the mere categorization (...) of an object as “art” versus “a tool” changes people's intuitions about the persistence of those objects over time. In a second study, we examine some conditions that may lead artworks to be thought of as different from other artifacts. These observations inform both current understanding of what makes some objects one-of-a-kind as well as broader questions regarding how people intuitively think about the persistence of human agents. (shrink)

Still, in this paper I’m not going to be laudatory, enthusiastic, or appreciative, but instead address the distinctly philosophical question of what a forgery is—investigate the concept of a forgery, as philosophers used to say, and sometimes still do. Only after that question and a few others have been answered should we ask the question that everyone wants to ask straight off: What, if anything, is aesthetically wrong with a forgery? Interesting as that question is, space limitations (...) prevent me from addressing it here. (shrink)

This paper investigates feasible ways of destroying artworks, assuming they are abstract objects, or works of a particular art-form, where the works of at least this art-form are assumed to be abstracta. If artworks are eternal, mind-independent abstracta, and hence discovered, rather than created, then they cannot be destroyed, but merely forgotten. For more moderate conceptions of artworks as abstract objects, however, there might be logical space for artwork destruction. Artworks as abstracta have been likened to impure sets (i.e., (...) sets of concrete things, as opposed to pure sets, i.e., sets of nothing but other sets) that have a beginning in time, namely when their members come into being, and an end in time, namely when their members cease to exist. Alternatively, artworks as abstracta have been thought of as types that are created with their first token. Artwork destruction is harder on this account: merely destroying every token might not yet destroy the type. To what extent such similes can be spelt out and made plausible as an ontology of artworks, and what options there are on the different accounts for artwork destruction, is explored in this paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Forgeries and Art Evaluation:An Argument for Dualism in AestheticsTomas Kulka (bio)If a fake is so expert that even after the most thorough and trustworthy examination its authenticity is still open to doubt, is it or is it not as satisfactory a work of art as if it were unequivocally genuine? 1It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted (...) with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter's studio. And what a picture! Neither the beautiful signature... nor the pointillé on the bread which Christ is blessing, is necessary to convince us that we have here—I am inclined to say—the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft... quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer. In no other picture by the great master of Delft do we find such sentiment, such a profound understanding of the Bible story—a sentiment so nobly human expressed through the medium of highest art.2The author of these lines is Professor Abraham Bredius, the nestor of Holland's art historians and the greatest authority on seventeenth-century Dutch painting. The source is The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, the most prestigious periodical for the history of art of the period. The year is 1937. The painting, however, is not a masterpiece of Vermeer but a fake produced by the mediocre Dutch artist Han van Meegeren.The Problem of ForgeryMany art dealers have been financially ruined, and many art historians academically discredited, because of incorrect attribution. Apart from the practical problems that worry curators and art historians, there is also a theoretical problem, which has become a subject of heated discussions since the late 1960s. The dispute gained a momentum with the publication of Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art. In its third chapter titled "Art and Authenticity," [End Page 58] which put the problem of forgeries on the agenda of contemporary aesthetics, Goodman states that a "philosopher of art caught without an answer to [the] question... why there is any aesthetic difference between a deceptive forgery and an original work... is at least as badly off as a curator of paintings caught taking a Van Meegeren Vermeer for a Vermeer."3Although the literature on the problem of forgeries is extensive, the answers that have been put forward fall roughly into three categories: the formalist answer, which states that there is no aesthetic difference between an original painting and a deceptive forgery; the reductionist answer, which claims that there is such a difference and that it can be traced to the minute physical differences between originals and its copies; and the historicist answer, which also asserts that there must be an aesthetic difference but claims that it stems from the different histories of the two objects.The most prominent proponent of the formalist approach is Monroe C. Beardsley. His theory is based on the assumption that "two objects that do not differ in any observable qualities cannot differ in aesthetic value."4 Aesthetic formalism, as the name suggests, maintains that works of art should be judged according to their form. Only the visual features of the painted surface—the configuration of its lines and colors, composition, spatial relations, texture, design, etc., are relevant for its appreciation. The subject of our evaluation is the finished product, not the information pertaining to the history of its production. Who, when, and where painted the picture, just like the intentions of the painter, are irrelevant for the assessment of its aesthetic qualities. Only the "internal" properties, that is, the properties of the "work itself," count. The "external" properties, by which Beardsley means anything that "relates to something existing before the work itself, to the manner in which it was produced, or its connection to antecedent objects," have no bearing on aesthetic value. Hence the conclusion that if fakes resemble the original "in their internal characteristics, so that no one could tell them apart just by looking at them" there can be no aesthetic difference between them.5 Originality is thus excluded... (shrink)

Artifacts include practical items such as tables, chairs, and screwdrivers, as well as artworks such as paintings, sculptures, and musical works. Social objects include social and institutional things such as dollars, borders, states, corporations, and universities. Although we are all familiar with such entities, it is far from clear what their nature or essence consists in and whether they even have a real nature or essence. The aim of this chapter is to survey and critically examine various positions on these (...) two central philosophical issues concerning essence and artifacts, artworks, and social objects. I first consider whether the kinds 'artifact' and 'social object'—as well as kinds of artifacts and social objects—have essences. I then inquire into what these essences may be. (shrink)

We seem to talk about repeatable artworks, like symphonies, films, and novels, all the time. We say things like, "The Moonlight Sonata has three movements" and "Duck Soup makes me laugh". How are these sentences to be understood? We argue against the simple subject/predicate view, on which the subjects of the sentences refer to individuals and the sentences are true iff the referents of the subjects have the properties picked out by the predicates. We then consider two alternative responses that (...) involve reading these sentences as generics, similar to "The polar bear has four paws". The first response takes these sentences to be about kinds, and the second takes the relevant noun-phrases to act as predicates. We reject these accounts, but offer a third alternative which is informed by both, and which enables us to deny the existence of repeatable artworks while endorsing the truth of sentences seemingly about them. (shrink)

FORGERY and PLAGIARISM are both forms of fraud. In committing art forgery I claim my work is by another person. As a plagiarist, I claim another person’s work is my own. In forgery, someone’s name is stolen in order to add value to the wrong work; in plagiarism someone’s work is stolen in order to give credit to the wrong author.

The sociology of art has experienced a significant revival during the last three decades. However, in the first instance, this renewed interest was dominated by the ‘production of culture’ perspective and was heavily focused on contextual factors such as the social organization of artistic markets and careers, and displays of ‘cultural capital’ through consumption of the arts. In this article, I outline a new mode of approaching art sociologically that begins with Alfred Gell’s (1998) Art and Agency, but comes to (...) full fruition in what I am calling the ‘new sociology of art’. A major theoretical statement that captures many of the aspirations of the new approach is Jeffrey Alexander’s essay: ‘Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning’. It is suggested that the new sociology of art has much in common with material culture studies, and that a more robust concept of the artwork’s agency is needed now that art has well and truly taken on a social and cultural life well beyond those institutions traditionally understood as the ‘art world’. (shrink)

Latin ‘plvs.’—To begin somewhat remotely, I am not satisfied with the current explanation of Lat. plus. As regards pleores, to pass over Cuny's mistaken derivation in MSL. 16. 322, the explanation from plēyōses is correct— IE. plēyo. : plēyos–:: Sk. návya: compv. návyas, cf. pánya: pányas and távya: távyas. IE. plēyes also appears, not only in Sanskrit as prắyas and in πλε–ων , but, by a quite rigorous phonetic, in O.Norse fleiri, from a primate flaiz-an (...) ‘sow,’ borrowed from a North Germanic verb-stem sā–ya shrink)

Although art forgery is documented throughout the history of Western art, philosophical discussion of the problems of art forgery is a relatively recent matter, beginning largely in the latter half of the twentieth century. Arising even more recently is the practice of creating ‘appropriation art’, a topic that has so far been largely ignored in aesthetics but which raises some challenging questions especially when compared with forgery. This article introduces some of the philosophical problems that arise from (...) the practice and products of art forgery and in the contemporary movement of art appropriation. Rather than involving issues on the periphery of aesthetics, I suggest, forgery and appropriation art cut to the heart of issues in the ontology of art, the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, and other central areas in the philosophy of art. (shrink)

Original paintings and forgeries are not sufficiently the same sort of thing to have many comparable aesthetic qualities. 1) many aesthetic quality predicates have the form of attributives: they are two-place relations between an object and a class of objects and have a semantic account which requires that the object belongs to the class to which it is related; 2) there is no useful semantic class which contains an original and its forgery and 3) therefore these paintings are not (...) to be compared in at least many aesthetic qualities. attention is given to style predicates, which are defined. (shrink)

Three artworks are discussed in detail by Heidegger in his lecture “Origin of the Work of Art.” Prioritizing one work above the others affects what is understood to be the overall project of the lecture. Because of this, we need to attend closely to the debate in the literature about the most important work of art in Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art.” This article explores the debate by looking at three positions. I examine each of these positions independently. (...) In the final section I side with those scholars who take the ancient Greek temple to be the most important work in Heidegger’s lecture. I argue that the reason why the temple is the most important is its ability to disclose community. (shrink)

Response to Gover (2015) on Trogdon and Livingston (2015) on artwork completion.

The field of scientific image integrity presents a challenging research bottleneck given the lack of available datasets to design and evaluate forensic techniques. The sensitivity of data also creates a legal hurdle that restricts the use of real-world cases to build any accessible forensic benchmark. In light of this, there is no comprehensive understanding on the limitations and capabilities of automatic image analysis tools for scientific images, which might create a false sense of data integrity. To mitigate this issue, we (...) present an extendable open-source algorithm library that reproduces the most common image forgery operations reported by the research integrity community: duplication, retouching, and cleaning. We create a large scientific forgery image benchmark with enriched ground truth using this library and realistic scientific images. All figures within the benchmark are synthetically doctored using images collected from creative commons sources. While collecting the source images, we ensured that the they did not present any suspicious integrity problems. Because of the high number of retracted papers due to image duplication, this work evaluates the state-of-the-art copy-move detection methods in the proposed dataset, using a new metric that asserts consistent match detection between the source and the copied region. All evaluated methods had a low performance in this dataset, indicating that scientific images might need a specialized copy-move detector. The dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/phillipecardenuto/rsiil. (shrink)

Art viewers and critics talk as if visual artworks say things, express messages, or have meanings. For instance, Picasso’s 'Guernica' has been described as a “generic plea against the barbarity and terror of war”, forming a “powerful anti-war statement”. One way of understanding meaning in art is to draw analogies with language. My thesis explores how the notion of a speech act – an utterance with a performative aspect – can illuminate art’s power to ‘speak’. In recent years, philosophers of (...) art have explored speech act theory in relation to literary art, though barely at all in relation to visual art. Given the way we talk about painting, sculpture, installation, film, and photography, and given that artists have investigated performativity through their art, this neglect is surprising. My thesis develops two main arguments. First, artwork meaning is active. I argue that visual artworks, under certain conditions, are speech acts. They have propositional content, and they have a certain force: they can do things such as assert, protest, and criticise – things we would normally do with words. I defend these contested claims against several dissenters, and explore some consequences: in particular, I explore how art can lie, a hitherto neglected question. Second, artwork meaning is flexible. I argue that what an artwork says and does is affected by the context in which it’s displayed, and in particular, by its curation. As a result, an artwork’s content and force can vary from context to context. This goes against a dominant view in the philosophy of art – what I call ‘Originalism’ – that the meaning of an artwork is fixed by factors which held at the time of the work’s creation, and so cannot change across time. I argue that this is mistaken: artworks can change in meaning. Curatorial factors can affect an artwork’s content and force, and consequently its social effects. It is known that our verbal speech has the power to oppress and liberate people in a society. My thesis aims to show that art also has this power to shape society; through what it says, and through what it does. (shrink)

What is art? What is it to understand a work of art? What is the value of art? Robert Stecker seeks to answer these central questions of aesthetics by placing them within the context of an ongoing debate criticizing, but also explaining what can be learned from, alternative views. His unified philosophy of art, defined in terms of its evolving functions, is used to explain and to justify current interpretive practices and to motivate an investigation of artistic value. Stecker defines (...) art as an item that is an artwork at time t if and only if it is in one of the central art forms at t and is intended to fulfill a function art has at t, or it is an artifact that achieves excellence in fulfilling such a function. Further, he sees the standard of acceptability for interpretations of artworks to be relative to their aim. Finally, he tries to understand the value of artworks through an analysis of literature and the identification of the most important functions of literary works. In addition to offering original answers to major questions of aesthetics, _Artworks_ covers most of the major issues in contemporary analytic aesthetics and discusses many major, as well as many minor, figures who have written about these issues, including Stanley Fish, Joseph Margolis, Richard Rorty, and Richard Shusterman. (shrink)

I sketch here an intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types, which are individuated in part by historical paths (re)production. Although attractive, this view has been rejected by a number of authors on the basis of general claims about abstract objects. On consideration, however, these general claims are overgeneralizations, which whilst true of some abstracta, are not true of all abstract objects, and in particular, are not true of created types. The intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types (...) is, then, left in place. (shrink)

Sándor Radnóti looks at forgeries, artistic reproductions, replicas, variations, and pastiches in order to study the dilemmas surrounding artistic illusion and "poetic license." He reveals how forgeries as the parasites of art make clear and transparent the meaning of artistic orginality.

Focusing on the connections between the artwork and its internal and external network, the article presents four different approaches to the sociology of art developed by Lyotard, Bourdieu, Luhmann, and Hennion and Latour. While Lyotard, from a phiosophical point of view, emphasizes the transcendence of the artwork in relation to its network, for Bourdieu the work of art is part of a network and the ‘social genesis’ grounds the artwork as an artwork. In contrast to Bourdieu, (...) Luhmann conceives of art as an autopoietic system and the artwork as a communicative artefact. Yet, in this, the materiality of the artwork disappears in communication, which is why Hennion and Latour’s approach to the world of art as heterogeneous networks of human and non-human mediators is significant. ‘Thinking with’ these different approaches, the article produces three main results. First, Bourdieu’s and Luhmann’s otherwise very different sociologies significantly parallel each other regarding arts and modernity. Second, the question of the artwork radically unravels the difficult relationship between social theory and material objects. In this respect most contemporary social theories (e.g. Bourdieu’s and Luhmann’s) remain essentially modernist. Third, a focus on artworks demonstrates that the conceptual vocabulary of social theory and the sociology of art must be reconsidered. Furthermore, the article demonstrates the discovery of a ‘lucid illusio’ and specifies a Spinozist moment in Bourdieu’s social theory. (shrink)

I propose a distinction between design intentions, activities and products, as opposed to artistic intentions, activities and artworks. Examples of design products would include a specific type of car (or any other invention or device) as well as closer relatives of art such as decorative wall designs. In order to distinguish artistic from design intentions, I present an example in which two sculptors independently work on a single object to produce two sculptures, which are distinct just because the artistic intentions (...) of the sculptors are distinct. This case is then contrasted with an attempted parallel example for design intentions, which fails to produce two correspondingly distinct design products in spite of the different design intentions of its designers. I argue that this failure occurs because designs are types, for which any single token of a given type could not simultaneously be a token of some other type of the same general kind; whereas the possibility of my sculptural 'double artwork' example shows that such artworks cannot be types. I then further investigate the concept of a design, and conclude by arguing that an extension of my sculptural example shows that literary artworks also cannot be types. (shrink)

Horgan believes that the truth of the statement “Beethoven’s fifth symphony has four movements” does not require that there be some “dedicated object” answering to the term “Beethoven’s fifth simphony”. To the contrary, the relevant language/world correspondence relation is less direct than this. Especially appropriate is the behavior by Beethoven that we would call “composing his fifth symphony”. Our objections go along two directions: (1) is the process ontology (a) really a right kind of ontology for artworks (symphonies, novels) and, (...) (b) more important, is this kind of ontology compatible with Parmenidian approach to ontology? The answer to (a) is negative. With reference to point (1b) we might say that Parmenides was a typical staunch advocate of substance metaphysics rather than process metaphysics. Traditionally, substances are individuated by their properties, namely, there are assumed two sorts of properties: primary and secondary. Primary properties describe the substance as it is in and by itself; secondary properties underlie the impact of substances upon others and the responses they elicit from them. (2) The claim that it is most unlikely to suppose that we can have some kind of cognitive contact “with an entity which has no spatio-temporal location and does not causally interact with anything” does not hold. We underpin the claim that there is some cognitive access to entity such as Beethoven’s fifth symphony with Bender’s theory of realization relation between musical work and performance. (shrink)

This manual, which includes texts, interviews and artwork from five decades of practice, is intended as a tool for any artist or practitioner looking to find a meaningful relationship with contemporary society. It proclaims, and argues for, a culture that promotes the fluid, transient, relative and complex society from which it stems.

Contemporary art is not a simple system based on the creation and dissemination of aesthetic and conceptual objects, but a complex set of institutional and social processes with different motivations, audiences and environments. Likewise, the contemporary artwork cannot be represented as a singular object, but a complex set of material, technological, social and psychic relations. This complexity can be traced to the 1960s when three cultural developments: the expansion of the artwork, the increase in ecological awareness and the (...) proliferation of systems thinking, and systems technology converged, shifting our focus from the material world to the underlying processes, relationships and data. This understanding leads to a focused description of the complex artwork Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson and how this work can be understood in systems, specifically ecological-systems terms. Such complex work extends beyond the confinement of the original material object to include a vast network of physical and social relations, and this expanded work is more accurately described as simultaneously system and object, or ecological object. (shrink)

This article delineates the notion of conjectural artworks—that is, ways of thinking and explaining formal and relational phenomena by visual means—and presents an appraisal and review of the use of such visual ways in the work of Chilean biologists and philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Particularly, the article focuses on their recurrent uses of Cellular Automaton, that is, discrete, locally interacting, rule-based mathematical models, as conjectural artworks for understanding the concepts of autopoiesis, structural coupling, cognition and enaction: (i.e. Protobio (...) and Bittorio). Additionally, the article proposes a new model of conjectural artwork based on an extension of cellular automaton: random Boolean networks namely, binary systems with variable local connections. Such model, as it is argued, is useful to connect the theoretical frameworks by Maturana and Varela, especially structural coupling and enaction, with other relevant fields such as biosemiotics’ Umwelt-research and cognitive landscapes in neurodynamics, and to advance and explore the concepts of structurally coupled categorization and generalization. (shrink)