Many forms of printmaking involve drawing or painting onto a plate to produce a matrix and then producing prints from that matrix by mechanical processes. One might be skeptical about the artistic significance of such prints, on the basis that only the process of drawing or painting the matrix enables printmakers to exercise intentional control over the features of the resultant prints. This might lead one to think that such forms of printmaking lack artistic significance independent of drawing (...) and painting. I examine whether or not such skepticism is warranted and argue that it is not. Nevertheless, I identify limitations on the independent artistic significance of another form of printmaking, namely that which involves producing prints from multiple matrices. (shrink)

A standard art-ontological position is to construe repeatable artworks as abstract objects that admit multiple concrete instances. Since photographic artworks are putatively repeatable, the ontology of photographic art is by default modelled after standard repeatable-work ontology. I argue, however, that the construal of photographic artworks as abstracta mistakenly ignores photography’s printmaking genealogy, specifically its ontological inheritance. More precisely, I claim that the products of printmaking media (prints) minimally must be construed in a manner consistent with basic print ontology, (...) the most plausible model of which looks decidedly nominalist (what I call the relevant similarity model) and that as such, photographic artworks must be likewise construed, not as abstracta but as individual and distinct concreta. That is, the correct ontological account of photographic art must be one according to which photographic artworks are individual and distinct concrete artworks. In the end, I show that the ontology of photographic art resists the standard repeatable-work model because the putative repeatability of photographic artworks is upon closer inspection nothing more than the relevant similarity relation between individual and distinct photographic prints. (shrink)

Comics comprise a hybrid art form descended from printmaking and mostly made using print technologies. But comics are an art form in their own right and do not belong to the art form of printmaking. We explore some features art comics and fine art prints do and do not have in common. Although most fine art prints and comics are multiple artworks, it is not obvious whether the multiple instances of comics and prints are artworks in their own (...) right. The comparison of comics and fine art prints provides a promising test for assessing how hybrid art forms develop more generally, and for assessing how they differ from closely related nonhybrid cousins. (shrink)

In this article I explore the concept of originality from several viewpoints. Within the world of printmaking, I show that while print dealers may draw attention to originality in order to enhance economic value, artists emphasize the aesthetic value of a work based on the freedom to express artistic intent and to experiment with techniques of the medium. Within the worlds of philosophy and to some extent, psychology, “originality” has been misleadingly tied to the notions of “creativity” and “genius,” (...) thereby replicating a cultural bias that links an artist to particular mental processes that are unnecessarily exclusive. An experiential account of creativity like the one recently advanced by Bence Nanay not only disadvantages those artists whose lived experiences reflect fewer social opportunities than their counterparts, but also invokes a concept of luck that undermines the role of originality within an artwork's overall aesthetic value. (shrink)

Issues concerning the spatial orientation of pictures play an important, though previously neglected, role in an adequate understanding of the nature and identity of visual artworks and other pictures. Using a previous contrast ('Artworks Versus Designs', BJA Vol. 41, No. 4, October 2001), I show that differing orientations of a design naturally give rise to distinct pictures, which may be appropriated as distinct artworks by a discerning artist--which also shows that such artworks cannot be types, since they share a common (...) token. The investigation also raises some significant issues concerning artistic printmaking, and strongly suggests in addition that two new concepts of interpretation--of identifying and constitutive interpretation--are required to adequately explain the artistic phenomena that are uncovered. (shrink)

Bolognese painter and printmaker Giovanni Luigi Valesio’s varied output included engravings featuring heraldic imagery coupled with allegorical figures and, in some cases, perplexing narratives. Their erudite, panegyric character is typical of thesis prints, elaborate ephemera made for the festive academic defences that flourished in early modern colleges. This essay establishes the heretofore unknown subject of one thesis print and offers a note on the dedicatee and art historical significance of another likely ‘conclusione’. Both prints were dedicated to cardinal nephews, Scipione (...) Borghese and Pietro Aldobrandini respectively, and they situate the position of the cardinal nephew as a militant force against the Ottoman world through learned allusion and consciously affective depictions of captivity. Drawing on the monumental imagery of their respective papacies and offering innovative conflations of historical and allegorical representation, they testify to a visual apologetics of nepotism as good government that permeated art and life in the Papal States. (shrink)

Published in 2018, ‘Re:Print’ is an experimental artists’ book, edited by Véronique Chance and Duncan Ganley, that brings together images and text by 20 contributors whose work addresses the role and language of the reproducible image. This article by Duncan Ganley discusses the challenges of translating artworks and text originally presented in the context of an exhibition and symposium, into a work of print an artists’ book. The range of contributors emphasizes the diverse scope of forms, processes and ideas in (...) the expanded field of Printmaking. Addressing a variety of approaches to integrating and repurposing this visual and textual material for the printed page, the article outlines the theoretical underpinning of the creation of ‘Re:Print’ and the editorial and design decisions taken to create a hybridized form that is both document and artwork and aims to draw out new agencies of the ‘book’ in a digital world. (shrink)

Over one hundred years after Max Weber delivered his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” his description of the work of the physician in a disenchanted world still resonates. As a chronically ill patient who interacts with physicians frequently, I struggle with reconciling my understanding of my ill body with how my physician makes sense of my illness. My diagnosis created an existential crisis that caused me to search for meaning in my embodied experience, but I soon learned there is little (...) room for such a search within modern biomedicine. Instead, I turned to fine art to help me make sense of my ill body and its purpose in my life. With the aid of my printmaker sister, Darian Goldin Stahl, I have transformed the magnetic resonance images of my body into works of art, which help to re-enchant my body and give purpose to my illness. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to locate various forms of printmaking in a broader framework for thinking about so-called ‘multiple’ artworks, artworks that, as this is normally put, admit of multiple instances. I first sketch a general framework for the philosophical exploration of multiple artworks and the philosophical issues to which they give rise. I then address certain forms of printmaking that might be thought to generate singular rather than multiple artworks. Next, I look at how those (...) print works that are multiples stand in relation to other multiple works of the same general type in respect of certain challenges relating to the repeatability and variability of works. Finally, I examine a further question—the problem of limitation—more specific to prints qua multiples. (shrink)

Marcantonio Raimondis so-called Caryatid Façade has received scant attention, yet it occupies an important place in the printmakers oeuvre and was widely admired and imitated in the sixteenth century. The image, which features an architectural façade adorned with Caryatid and Persian porticoes and an oversized female capital, does not fit easily with the usual narrative about Raimondis career in Rome, summed up in Vasaris account that he collaborated with Raphael to publicise the masters storie. Rather than being an illustration of (...) a religious or mythological subject, it brings together architectural fantasia, archaeology and Vitruvian studies, reflecting on the origins of the orders and the nature of architectural ornament. Arguably, it is also an indirect trace of Raphaels unfinished projects to reconstruct Rome and to collaborate with humanist Fabio Calvo and others on a new, illustrated edition of Vitruvius. (shrink)

Catalogue of an exhibition which addresses contemporary printmaking issues/concerns within a Tasmanian context.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 114-121 [Access article in PDF] TRANSFORMING IMAGES: HOW PHOTOGRAPHY COMPLICATES THE PICTURE, by Barbara E. Savedoff. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000, 233 pp., $35.00 hardcover. The very title of Barbara Savedoff's book invites us on a journey into photography's multiple roles. Photographic images transform their subjects at the same time that they themselves are the results of transformations. They also (...) complicate comfortable distinctions between fact and fiction because the world from which they come is complicated.This book appears at a time full of fear (felt by some) and excitement (felt by others) sparked by digital image-making, in which the culture of photography is undergoing transformations of its own. It is a passionate time, with some unwilling to throw the still photograph into the "defunct" pile, while others are all too ready to do so. The limits and possibilities of the still photograph need to be redefined if it is going to have any meaning to anyone anymore.Through the din of voices, through the heated discussions, Savedoff's voice rings clear. Her meditations on the nature of still photography and its relation to the pictorial forms that preceded it (painting, drawing, printmaking) and proceed from it (film, digital photography) are written in a style that seeks to include, not exclude the reader. Art is complicated enough. Writing about art need not complicate it further.Savedoff focuses her inquiry on the way photographs transform works of art and other representations. From the insight that this specificity allows, she attempts to build a more general account of photographic transformation. First, she examines the fascination in Western painting — a fascination that has been influenced by legends and literature — with the idea that representations are alive or can come to life. She begins with paintings that actually illustrate such legends. Then she goes on to paintings where the distinction between the "real" and the "represented" is ambiguous. One such type she calls "gestural ambiguity," found frequently in Northern Renaissance and late Italian Renaissance paintings, "where figures that are given the placement and coloring of stone statues are at the same timegiven the expressive aspect or functions of living beings. Artworks are depicted as though they were alive" (p. 14). Another type, "perceptual ambiguity," is found in Postimpressionist paintings, when artworks and "real" things are painted in the same manner (p. 24). The latter type of ambiguity is created when paintings or sculptures within a painting are depicted in a styleand scale similar to their surroundings, blurring the distinction between what is "real" and what is "represented" in the painting.Savedoff uses some excellent examples in analyzing these ambiguities. And just when the reader begins [End Page 114] to question whether, if there are different ways of achieving ambiguity in paintings of artworks, there must also be different purposes for each, Savedoff addresses precisely this. "In paintings from the Renaissance to Impressionism," she writes, "ambiguity is used to further an ideal of illusionism in art: the artwork is shown as capable of life or at least of being confused with real things" (p. 30). Although this kind of ambiguity may animate representations within the painting, it does so without casting doubt on the status of the "real" things depicted. In contrast, ambiguity used in Postimpressionist paintings were done so for quite a different effect: "to undermine any tendency of the painting toward illusionism and to undercut the status of the 'real' things depicted" (p. 30).Although she critiques the nature and purpose of ambiguity in paintings thoroughly, when Savedoff addresses ambiguity in photography her conclusions are not as well defended. In photography, she writes, "perceptual ambiguity"— that is, the blurring of the distinctions between people and representations — can result from the nature of the medium itself: "the stillness, the flatness, and, in black and white photographs, the limitation of monochrome values" (p. 43). A deliberate choice of angle, framing, and lighting by the photographer can alsoreduce the differences. "Gestural ambiguity" in photography, she continues, can be created when the photographer juxtaposes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Propaedeutic to Walter BenjaminDavid Socher (bio)I took the picture—the Marines took Iwo Jima.—Joe Rosenthal (1912-2006)The Emerson College Web site on Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction1 nicely animates some ideas of the essay. One such idea is the following: To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. When Benjamin wrote this (...) essay and this maxim, Norman Rockwell had been illustrating magazine covers for both Boy's Life and the Saturday Evening Post for several years. Rockwell, who also made paintings for advertisements, said he didn't "want to paint for the few who can see a canvas in a museum." He wanted his "pictures to be published," exemplifying Benjamin's point.2 Wood engravings have been around for a thousand years and coins with portraits for two thousand. I don't mention these old examples to dispute Benjamin's point—certainly to an ever-greater degree the modern age designs for reproducibility. And Benjamin himself at the outset mentions the stampings, coins, and terra cottas of the Greeks as ancient cases of reproduction of a work of art. I merely intend to highlight the distinction between creating a print and painting a painting or drawing a drawing. In the latter cases the artist's goal is to produce one particular physical surface. We often imbue this surface with what Benjamin called an aura.3 Collectors of Rockwell Post covers don't have Rockwell's auras,4 and even less so those who have and hang reproductions of such covers. The making of prints has its own cachet, however. Although he is far from a typical printmaker, M. C. Escher here expresses a thought applicable to all printmakers: "The printmaker has [End Page 1] something of the minstrel spirit; he sings, and in every print … he repeats his song over and over again."5As is usual with such illustrations, Rockwell's paintings were put on magazine covers by photographic processes. Rockwell, of course, is not a photographer. His name will not be included in the history of photography. Why is it even worth stating such more-than-obvious observations? Because Benjamin seems to me to be mixed up about photography and the mix-up pervades his essay, even including his very title. Getting clear about exactly what photography is will help untangle things. Therefore, before turning to Benjamin's text, allow me a few words on photography.It is hard to overstate the importance of photography. About his own parents, whom he had never seen, Dickens's Pip says, he "never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs)."6 Many school textbooks feature photos of children in a classroom, but often these are staged photos not actually taken in a classroom. At least one textbook publisher keeps props, including a wheelchair to take photos of "Able bodied children selected through modeling agencies [posing] in the wheelchair."7 Well, it's hard to get disabled children to serve as models, and in this way the publisher meets his disability quota. In such a case the photo is not doctored. It does picture the event in front of the camera, although unknown to the student, the picture is staged and the pictured student is neither in a classroom, nor disabled. This is a small deception; it is, however, a greater deception than is normal for, say, clothing catalogues. In such a catalogue all know that the model photographed is not actually skiing or chopping wood, although the model is so pictured. In the textbook an able-bodied child is presented as a disabled one, however, no direct falsehoods are being taught and no picture is falsely captioned. On the other hand, when a news agency doctors, falsely captions, or stages a picture, the deception is great.Newspapermen and newspaperwomen know well that photo-ops and managed news are cases where the tail wags the dog inasmuch as the event itself was only created for the sake of the picture. Somewhat similarly, staged wedding photos and other... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article is about three bodies of visual work that raise questions of cultural belonging, hybridity, and memory. I use languages of printmaking, drawing, photography, and poetry to creatively trace processes of memory of place and meanings we make with it. In Migrant Universe, drawings function as rearrangeable continua of maps, landscapes, and portraits of memory and identity. Catalogue of Silence, an installation of photographs, an essay, and poems about the state of cultural institutions in my native city (...) of Sarajevo, is an elegy for what has been irretrievably lost as well as a testament of hope that the city will rebound and be, as it was in the past, a fertile ground for new ways of cultural thriving. In Beginnings and Endings, a series of etchings, images culled from science, explosion traces, and comic book speech bubbles are placed on liquid and unsteady ground, invaded by fungi, functioning as icons of precarity: the loss and the promise of it. In this precipitous moment in human history, in American history, what can we learn about our survival as a species, and a global civilization, from the stories of migrants, seeds, and mushrooms? (shrink)

Introduction. What are the arts and how do we respond to and evaluate them? -- Pictures : drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography -- Sculpture -- Architecture -- Music -- Literature -- Theatre -- Cinema -- Dance.

In this paper, the author addresses the problem of socialisation of children with a history of disabilities and mental retardation by means of visual arts. It is important to look at the very sphere of life of these categories of children. As a rule, these children, for the most part, live in dysfunctional families, which makes it almost impossible to provide them with a form of socialization. This article focuses on the extent to which and how a programme of socialisation (...) of these children can be achieved through the medium of visual arts. At the moment there are works of modern pedagogues who have devoted their scientific researches to this problem, but there are few teachers-artists who deal with this problem. In this article the author devotes his creative attention to this issue and reflects on what means of fine arts and visual literacy can develop and guide in the right direction the socialization of children and young people with disabilities by means of fine arts. A number of scientific works devoted to this problem are seriously reviewed. The author is actively trying to draw the attention of the teaching community to the problem of prevailing social conditions, to reach an educational and cognitive level and, as a consequence, to a better product of the set task of socialization of children with special needs and disabilities in the learning process by means of subject disciplines: drawing, painting, composition, printmaking, etc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Artist as Professional in JapanKazuyo Nakamura and Akio OkazakiThe Artist as Professional in Japan, edited by Melinda Takeuchi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004, 262pp., $45.00 cloth.With the increase of cross-cultural academic exchange in our time, more accurate information on art from other cultures has become more easily available, and curriculum development of art education directed toward multiculturalism has been brought to realization. There is need emerging (...) among art educators for academic resources for teaching cross-cultural subject matters, and The Artist as Professional in Japan provides historical information helpful in gaining a critical understanding of the nature of Japanese art discourse. The volume is edited from a fresh sociocultural perspective by Melinda Takeuchi, professor of Japanese art at Stanford University.Takeuchi, noticing that few scholarly books on the profession of Japanese artists are available to students of art history in the United States, set about the volume in concerted efforts with her colleagues. The volume consists of individual case studies on different Japanese artists; they are well-known sculptors, painters, potters, printmakers, and architects and are recognized in Japan as representative in different eras from the seventh to the twentieth century. Running through the individual studies, there is a concern for political forces that shaped art discourse and the identity of the Japanese artist. The following questions are asked: What degree of control did the artists exercise over their métier? What were some of the dynamics operating in the production, consummation, and evaluation of art and artist? How was the image of the artist formed during various periods? Working with these questions, seven case studies address issues of canon formation of art by looking into the terrain of the meaning of a critical word, Shoku-nin; it literally means people (nin) with an occupation (shoku) and denotes the collective artisan class.Different art historians and art theorists take a unique approach for developing each case study in the volume. Donald F. McCallum's study in chapter 2 is on the Buddhist Icons of the Shaka Triad during the Asuka Period (ca.590-ca.650), and it is asked what were the political forces working on the production of the [End Page 118] icons. In contrary to orthodox view, it is argued that the icons were produced not by an individual sculptor named Tori-busshi but by the guilds of which the supervisor was Tori. Also, it is argued that the icons were produced with the patronage of soga clan, the dominant political force of the time, not by the imperial family, including Shotoku Taishi.Karen L. Brock in chapter 3 examines the case of E'nichibo Jonin (active ca.1211-ca.1243), the painter of Saint Myoe. The case shows that the ateliers of temples, such as Kozanji in Kyoto, played a central role in producing and distributing sacred images. This study makes clear that few individual painters, such as those named ebusshi, participated in the formation of the canon of Japanese painting, but collective political forces, such as Kozanji ateliers, exercised power in bringing out sacred objects.In chapter 4 Melinda Takeuchi takes up the case of Tosa Mitsunobu (1434-ca.1523), an artisan painter active in Kyoto court circles. It shows a historical fact particular to Japanese art discourse—that later artists manipulated the names of earlier ones for professional or cultural merits. Taking notice of the fact that Mitsunobu's name late became synonymous with a production unit that shares secret techniques of products, Takeuchi concludes, "In the end, the name of an artist transcends time, space, materiality, and ultimately discourse itself" (101).The study of Louise Allison Cort in chapter 5 is on the case of Morita Kyuemon in the seventeenth century, a warrior trained as a potter and running the Odo pottery in the Tosa domain. By exploring the motivations of the Tosa domain in trying to transform local products into refined and stylish pottery worthy of formal presentation to other domain rulers (daimyo), to government officials, and to the shogun in Edo, this chapter demonstrates how both the potter and the ruler actively sought to join the aesthetic mainstream of their own day.In... (shrink)

The aim of this inquiry is to determine whether printmaking is best understood ontologically as analogous to a work-performance relation. Are prints the visual analogue of symphonies? My motivation for pursuing the comparison of printmaking to music is twofold. First, because relatively little has been written on the ontology of fine art prints, our use of an already developed body of scholarship will help us to gain some traction on the question. Second, within the existing literature on the (...) ontology of prints, there seems to be a persistent confusion about the difference between what makes a print an artwork, and what makes it a genuine or authentic artwork, signed or in some other way ratified by a given artist. I conclude by suggesting that prints are indeed ontologically unusual insofar as they occupy an intermediate position between pure multiples, of which there can be an unlimited number of tokens, and singular artworks that consist of one physical object. (shrink)

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was a true nineteenth-century visionary—a painter, printmaker, set designer, entrepreneur, inventor, and pioneer of photography. Though he was widely celebrated beyond his own lifetime for his invention of the daguerreotype, it was his origins as a theatrical designer and purveyor of visual entertainment that paved the way for Daguerre's emergence as one of the world's most iconic imagemakers. In Speculating Daguerre, Stephen C. Pinson reinterprets the story of the man and his time, painting a vivid picture (...) of Daguerre as an innovative artist and savvy impresario whose eventual fame as a photographer eclipsed everything that had come before. Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence and unplumbed archival sources, Pinson mixes biography with an incisive study of Daguerre's wide-ranging involvement in visual culture. From his work as a commercial lithographer to his coinvention of the Paris Diorama—a theater in the round in which Daguerre employed natural light and special effects to simulate time and movement in large-scale paintings—here we are given access to Daguerre the artist, whose tireless experimentation, entrepreneurial spirit, and exceptional talent for popular spectacle helped to usher in a new visual age. Filled with more than one hundred illustrations and including the first complete catalogue of Daguerre's paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print, the publication of Speculating Daguerre will be a much-heralded event for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the most fascinating characters in the history of photography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000Carol S. GouldJapan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000. By Jan Walsh Hokenson. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Pp. 520. $80.00.Jan Walsh Hokenson's masterful work, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000, traces the migration of the Japanese aesthetic into French art, through French literature, and ultimately into Western modernism and postmodernism. Despite the title, this (...) book goes beyond French poetics, for it deals with some philosophical views about knowledge and art, and it offers an extended argument for the value of comparative studies, including comparative philosophy. The author moves easily among the areas of literature, art, and philosophy, all of which she discusses with authority.Her story begins with the birth of 'japonisme,' the term coined by critic Philippe Burty in 1876 to refer to the passion-artistic and commercial-for things Japanese. She identifies three waves of japonisme in French literature: pre-World War I, between the wars, and post-World War II. She leads the reader through each of these waves, detailing the cultural and artistic milieu in each and closely analyzing key figures.For the origins of japonisme, Hokenson takes us to the studio of Parisian engraver, printmaker, and designer Felix Bracquemond in 1856, which was just after the end of Sakoku. Bracquemond, according to the "most persistent legend," [End Page 699] opened a box of Asian ceramics and discovered that they were wrapped in extraordinary materials-layers of Hokusai woodcut prints the likes of which he had never seen. He summoned members of his circle, which included Manet, Degas, and Whistler (pp. 13-15). It is thus through an intriguing historical contingency that this relatively inexpensive, mass-produced art form would become the inspiration for some of the most personal and expensive art works today. More relevant to Hokenson's interest, however, is the fact that these woodcuts would be a seminal force in the direction of French letters.Had Bracquemond not had the vision to see the artistry of these prints or had the shipper used a different packing material, would Western painting and literature have taken a different turn? Would the West have seen impressionism, symbolism, or art nouveau? Would Proust, Claudel, Mallarmé, and others have written different works? From Hokenson's account one gleans that the French avant-garde eye was ready to see Hokusai and others, for artists felt that the mimetic view of art had led them to an impasse. Visual and literary artists were ready to abandon the Renaissance ideals of verisimilitude, perspective, the integrity of space, and the linearity of time. They were ready to accept the fragmentation of picture space, perspectivism, and suggestiveness that were all characteristic of the Japanese aesthetic.She explains how Henri Bergson, with his theories of intuition and subjective time, provided a philosophical foundation for the artistic commitments of the early japonistes. She documents the access many of the japonistes had to Bergson. Bergson, like the japoniste poets and painters themselves, emerged from a French tradition of using subjectivity as a starting point. The reader sees this respect for the subjective interact with various Japanese influences over the course of the twentieth century. The receptiveness to the haiku exemplifies this phenomenon, as it begins from a fleeting, intuitive, personal experience. She points out that "by 2000, the haiku was almost a commonplace in French poetry" (p. 407).Although she says little about what Bergson may have absorbed from the japonistes, she does tell of the little-known influence exerted by the Japanese phenomenologist Kuki Shūzō in 1928 on Jean-Paul Sartre. Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir either forgot this relationship or forgot to mention it in their respective narratives about the development of existentialism. Indeed, this was not discovered, Hokenson reports, until the 1980s. She rightly points out that that this changes the usual story about French philosophy in the early twentieth century, for it means that Sartre became acquainted with German phenomenology before 1932 and from someone other than Raymond Aron (pp. 333-334, 343, 474 n. 10). In a fascinating discussion of Kuki's... (shrink)

In this paper I target the relationship between two prints that are roughly qualitatively identical and share a causal history. Is one an artwork if and only if the other is an artwork? To answer this, I propose two competing principles. The first claims that certain intentional relations must be shared by the prints (e.g., editioned prints vs. non-editioned prints). The second, which I endorse, appeals only to minimal print ontology, claiming that the two prints need only be what I (...) call 'relevantly similar' to one other. There are no trumping features over and above relevant similarity. For any pairwise comparison of relevantly similar prints, one print being an artwork is both necessary and sufficient for the other print being an artwork. (shrink)

Christy Mag Uidhir’s Art and Art-Attempts begins from two deceptively simple observations: artworks are the product of intentions, and intentions are the kinds of things that can fail to be realized successfully. Drawing on these observations, he argues that most contemporary theories of art must be rejected because they are not substantively intention-dependent: that is, they do not account for the fact that an attempt to make an artwork can fail. From his view that artworks must be the product of (...) art-attempts that are subject to failure, Mag Uidhir derives implications for many domains in the philosophy of art. He argues that artworks cannot be abstract objects, since abstract objects cannot participate in causal relations and thus can’t be the product of art attempts: one can’t coherently intend or attempt to create something that exists eternally. Things that we think of as repeatable artworks, then, can’t be abstract types: instead, Mag Uidhir proposes, every artwork is concrete, but some are tied together by a relation of relevant similarity. In this symposium, Mag Uidhir replies to three critics, David Davies, Sherri Irvin and Keith Lehrer. All three critics examine the relevant similarity relation that Mag Uidhir proposes to account for artworks that we treat as repeatable, while also considering a variety of other issues. (shrink)