My Two Cents about Art

From my limited understanding of poetry, originally they were a combination of both singing and words. They were presented orally. The poem in that instance could not be separated from those elements. We no longer think of poetry that strictly. We are more lenient about what we consider poetry. Essentially I hold that anything that holds itself to be art is art (or poetry) anything that is considered art as long as it provides some relevant historical technical based justification for its existence can be considered good art. I think demarcating and limiting the idea of art is silly, it achieves very little if anything besides providing humans with a privileged position. Here are two of the papers I wrote last term. Yes they are full of grammatical mistakes, and yes they are confusing, my professor shares your pains, and thus I offer my sympathies.

Defining Art
The Need for an Archeology

Anybody interested in defining art should first ask himself or herself what would constitute a successful definition of art. If this question is too hard, we can approach this end by a series of steps. First we must determine whether or not a definition should act prescriptively or descriptively. The obvious answer seems to be that a definition is descriptive. If a definition tries to act prescriptively it runs the high risk on not being accepted by the very people who are suppose to profit from the definition. It seems that a definition must be able to adhere to what to its use. It at first may not seem controversial to argue that a definition must be essentially descriptive in nature but most of the current definitions of art are not entirely descriptive and try to reclaim some of the ground lost to contemporary and experimental artists by lacing their definitions with prescriptive elements.
Before we can accept a descriptive definition of art based on the notion that it best represents the common use of the word we should ask whether or not such a definition should really be based on the common use. Leaving aside difficulties of capturing the common use of a word, imagine that art was defined in such a way that it required some amount of knowledge to be understood. The first problem comes in determining how much knowledge is necessary to make an accurate judgment concerning the status of a thing as art.
Arthur Danto in his now famous journal article, The Artworld, presents us with the caricature, Testadura “a noted plain speaker and philistine.” Testadura challenges Danto to answer the question: What is the difference between an art object and a real object? The answer that Danto provides, the precursor to the Institutional theory of art, eliminates the possibility that Testadura can know the definition of art, at least not immediately. For Danto before one can make a judgment about the status of an object as art they must be aware of the “is of artistic identification.” The “is of artistic identification” is the ability to distinguish the property of an object which allows it to fall within the dialogue about art from those that fall outside it. (I am, perhaps improperly introducing a term which foreshadows my conclusion. By dialogue I mean the context of already established art in the socio-historical sense.) Only a person aware of the dialogue of art can make judgments regarding the status of an artwork in relation to that dialogue. Testadura as a noted plain speaker and philistine does not have the proper knowledge to distinguish between art objects and real objects.
This conclusion begs the question, who can distinguish between art objects and real objects? One would imagine that an established artists would have the ability to distinguish between art objects and real objects. Oswald Hanfling presents us with the anecdotal story of an artists banned from an art gallery for eating another artist’s work. The artist’s work was a bag of doughnuts on a pedestal (Hanfling 4). It would seem that even being part of the artworld is not enough of a prerequisite to make judgments of art. One also has to be aware of the role of the specific object in relation to the dialogue. One is required to already know that something is part of art world, or least that one is a candidate (to borrow something from Dickie) before a judgment about the object’s status can be made. It does not seem necessary that everyone within the artworld have the proper understanding of the dialogue specific to doughnuts in order to grant that object the status of art. For example someone who has specialized in Medieval art is probably not aware of doughnut art. Such a person would not be able to confer the status of art on the doughnuts, even as they are part of the artworld. So not only is a person required to have specific knowledge of a specific object but one is also required to be aware of a specific context within the artworld. If specificity of context is required than someone aware of any context of art has some claim to the artworld; and if specificity of the object is required it is possible for someone to understand the role a specific object within that context while denying it to a very similar object which would also be art. For example Testadura has an ornate gun. At the gun show there was an exhibit on guns as art. He noticed the similarities between the guns there and his gun thus he came to conclude that he is in possession of a work of art. But when he was hanging out with his friend Bill he was not aware that Bill also has a piece of art, Bill’s own ornate gun. Testandura by attending the show was able to gather enough knowledge about the specific context of art to classify his own gun as art, but not so enough to qualify Bob’s gun. All that seems required is that someone is aware of some part of the dialogue of art to be able to make a judgment of art. If that is correct, than very few people if any would fall outside the artworld.
The only prerequisite to the artworld that Danto should have is that an individual is aware of some art to make judgments of art. This seems a very fair requirement and would not in anyway argue against a definition of art as common usage. George Dickiem understanding perhaps this or some other problem with Danto’s definition, would include everyone willing to join into the art world: “Every person who sees himself a member of the artworld is therefore a member” (Dickie 36). Stephen Davies identifies this as the point of divergence between Danto and the Institutional persuasion (Davies 81).
Having settled that first, a definition of art must be descriptive, and second a definition must be based on common usage; it is necessary to ask whether a functional or procedural definition is superior. I very much agree with Davies’ conclusion that disagreements between art theories depend on disagreements between the ways one thinks about art. According to Davies one can have either a functional or a procedural definition of art. He considers the Institutional theory of art to be emblematic of the procedural definition. The Institutional theory of art posits that for an object to be a work of art it must be declared a work of art by someone who is part of the artworld. A procedural definition defines an object as art after it has undergone a certain process, in the case of the institutional theory this process is recognition by the artworld.
A functional theory of art on the other hand seeks to find a common function of art that would act to unify the concept. Kant’s theory of art would be considered functional in so far as a piece of art creates a certain interplay between the harmonies. The art creates a certain something in the viewer. After Morris Weitz’s critique of a common intrinsic property to art based on the Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblance most people have shied away from a dunctional approach. Wittgenstein argued that both a and b and c fall under x but the similarity between a,b and c is not x. For example (a) card games, (b)football, and (c)board games are all (x)games but the similarity, the resemblance of these games is not found in the concept game. There is nothing specifically that the concept game says about each of the games that would both be necessary and sufficient to define a game and exclusive to games (Mandelbaum, Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts). Weitz separated the concept art form the individual arts (painting, sculpture etc.) and says that there is nothing in the concept of art that is necessary and sufficient to all works of art (Davies 5-7). After this critique those who wish to hold an essentialist position (that there is some thing similar to all works of art) have turned not to intrinsic characteristics of art but to a function that the art plays.
Davies presents Beardsley’s account as the most plausible of the new wave of essentialist positions. On page 53 Davies presents 5 characteristics necessary for an aesthetic experience, which is the function that art plays in Beardsley’s definition. It seems possible to have something that falls outside of these 5 and still be considered an art Davies provides the example of Fountain. Because we have decided that the role of a definition of art cannot be prescriptive it has to be decided that Beardsley’s theory fails to account for all objects which are considered art objects as I believe Davies, much more convincingly than me. points out. If there is any essential nature to art either intrinsic or in some other regard it must come only after art becomes a closed concept (it cannot change), it cannot close the concept of art itself. There should be no doubt that art is currently an open definition. It is not impossible for there to be a functional definition of art but it must come after a procedural definition is established and accounts for all past, present and possible future works of art. It may very well be possible that the justification implicitly used were based on some yet unfound characteristic of art. The Institutional theory of art leaves open this possibility.
So far we have established that a definition of art must be descriptive, based on common usage and procedural (at least until a suitable essentialist definition is proposed). There is one further requirement for a definition: it must be useful. If a definition is not useful, there would be no reason to have one. A useful definition, as Maurice Mandelbaum points out, is one that can form a basis for art criticism. “The work of any critic presupposes at least an implicit art theory, which-as the critic-it is not his aim to establish or, in general, to defend” (Mandelbaum 228). A definition of art has to allow us to be able to understand the concept about which we are talking in the process of criticism. If two different critics disagree this disagreement may be settled with a useful definition of art that would allow for meaningful disagreement.
The question originally proposed, “What is a successful definition of art?,” is answered in this way: A successful definition of art is descriptive, based on common usage, it is procedural and it is useful. Determining if such a definition is successful we require the aesthetician to look and see if it is the definition of art being used. The closest definition to this is that I have come across is the form of Institutionalism presented by Dickie. There are indications that both Richard Wollheim and Davies have more advanced ideas.
Dickie presents five arguments for his stance as reported in Davies (it is worth reproducing these in full):
(1) An artists is a person who participates with understanding in the making of an artwork; (2) a work of art is an artifact of a kind created to be presented to them; (3) a public is a set of persons who are prepared in some degree to understand an object that is presented to them; (4) the Artworld is the totality of all Artworld systems; (5) an Artworld system is a framework for the presentation of a work of art by an artists to an Artworld public. (Davies 84)
There are three kinds of works that may not to fall into this classification: works in isolation, works my non-humans, and works that are not artifacts.
In Art and the Aesthetic Dickie made it clear that one artists can constitute an artworld and can bestow the status of art on an object (Dickie 38; Davies 84-90). If the person is aware of the artworld than all the 5 qualifications are met. It would not seem possible for someone to think of something as art unless they are aware of art, and art is only possible in the context of the artworld. Competing concepts of art can exist independently of the art world. For example there is a parallel identical world to ours and they have the exact same concept of art as ours and we are not now or will never be aware of their existence. Under Dickie’s 4 what is produced is not art because it is not part of the same. It seems wrong to assume that if there is nothing to unite the two worlds one’s art counts as art and the other would not be considered art underneath the other’s concept of art. It would seem necessary to say that if we were to become aware of that world we would immediately recognize it as ours and Dicke would have no problem with that. There is still a tension, there seems to be an inclination to say that such works are works of art independently of our being aware of them. This tension will be examined more fully later, but sadly will not be resolved.
Dickie by his own account cannot deny the status of art to non-human art. The example presented in the Art and the Aesthetics was that of chimpanzees who painted and their paintings were on display at the zoo. Dickie seems to be required to concede that if the zoo keepers treated the paints as art they must be art. It is not necessary for the paintings to be exhibited at an art museum as he argued but merely displayed as works of art. The condition is and should be much weaker. If exhibition at an art gallery is required the paints one sees in coffee shops would not properly be considered art (assuming we are unable to assertion anything else about them). But even in a coffee shop the works are presented as works of art thus it is necessary for Dickie to concede that exhibited chimpanzee paintings are works of art even if they are presented by the zoo.
Dickie originally had a very broad definition of artifact; in Art and the Aesthetics he claimed that an artifact is anything touched by human intention (Dickie 42). This is of course contrasted with artifact as something through work (Davies 123 at least part a of the definition). This is an essential distinction in aesthetics. The degree to which Dickie holds what qualifies something as an artifact should be first examined before ascribing him a position. If a piece of driftwood is taken home and used as art than Dickie would call it an artifact. But it is also imaginable that if someone were to not touch the piece of wood and build around it because it is a piece of art it would qualify that piece of driftwood as an artifact. Yet, Dickie not would qualify the Grand Canyon as a work of art even though humans have build around it (Davies 122). Dickie seems to be walking a fine line by even considering no human creations as works of art, but he needs to do this because drift wood art is considered art. Any theory that does not account for drift wood art is in danger of offering a prescriptive definition. Dickie should not be so hesitant to say that works of art should be artifacts. If at one time non-artifacts will be considered art, so be it. The definition does not limit the concept it merely describes it.
What aesthetics needs is an archeology, like Michel Foucault provided for madness. Archeology in this sense is the history of a concept. The work of Kristeller and Tatarkiewicz goes a long way towards this end, but they fail to continue the history to the current understanding of art, or at least much closer to it. This was also a fault of Foucault’s. These histories show just how messy a definition of a concept can be. I will try to briefly sketch such a paradigm (but the graph us much easier to follow): a has x, y1, and z1; a is defined as art because x was the necessary and sufficient condition for art; b1 has y2, and c1 has z2; b1 and c1 are classified as art because of the similarities to a not because they have x even though it is possible that they have x; b2 has y3, b3 has y4, c2 has z3, and c3 has z4; b2 ,b3, c2 , and c3 are classified as art not because they have x, y2 , and z2 but because they share something with b1 and c1. A graph will be much more useful:
Though this paints a nice clear picture there are many possibilities within the system that would complicate the system. For example b3 and c2 could be the same thing. What is important to realize from this chart is that objects that are classified as art are not done so in terms of what was originally defined as art but in terms of the commonality with a specific established art. There are many complications that can only be shown with a proper archeology. There are certain things which may share yn where one is considered an art and the other is not, and example would be brick laying and either architecture or sculpture.
Danto’s point that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box would not have been able at any other point in history than at the one it came about is only partially correct (Davies 92, Danto 581). The only thing that cannot happen on the chart is a jump from bl to bs where one does not immediately follow from the other. But it seems that the Brillo Box bears enough similarity to Greek sculpture to make a case that such a jump was possible, but not actual. Matters such as this can be established in a proper archeology.
There can be a bl and bs as long as there was once a bridge between these two different arts. This indicates that something that was once considered an art may no longer be considered an art. These occurrences are not common but they happen, Kristeller presents the example of gardening. A definition of art that defines an art in terms of established art is a simplified Institutional account which has no possibility of saying anything prescriptive about art. The only one condition that this theory requires is that there cannot be a jump between bl and bs. This is a justified assumption because it seems impossible for some to call something art which has no relation to anything that is established art.
This theory does not account for the tension brought up earlier concerning two independent definitions of art that do not share a common development. The only defense that I see is to argue that it is highly unlikely that two independent similar definitions of art can arise. It seems possible though that the Chinese and the Europeans have a different a as their starting point. One may start at an a which is another culture’s bn in this way there is not one nice progression, but more importantly there seems to the need for something that encompasses a and abn. This critique takes the form the “Third Man Argument” in Plato. I am convinced that if such a problem arose it could be resolved, if there is a proper archeology which can highlight both the similarities and the differences.
Richard Wollheim offers two critiques of the Institutional theory that are very much worth considering. The first is that when someone calls something like a piece of drift wood, art they are using the word art in a very different sense; they are not classifying the work, but merely describing it (Wollheim 159 Mandelbaum makes the same point). This will open up the scope of the definition, the definition will become too wide. Wollheim continues on this point to show that it is likely that the Institutionalist would do answer whether or not a member of the art world has a good reason to classify something as art. This would make the concept even wider, so wide in fact that Wollheim believes that the definition become trivial. It cannot offer grounds for distinguishing between good and bad art and it breaks the connection between art and its status (ibid. 163-4). The first point is not very convincing and it does not seem that it is the duty of a definition to create such a distinction. The second is much more troubling because there does seem to be a certain sense in society that there is a value to art. Yet, to adjust the definition to encapsulate this sense would be to offer prescriptive definition of art. It is not the definition that is diminish the value of art, but art itself as Wollheim himself seems to imply (165-6).
An Institutional theory of art does not forfeit all claims to a prescriptive definition, only in so doing could it become a successful definition of art. The theory I proposed would give up these pretensions and it would in the end be much less susceptible certain critiques. It does have problems, mostly of becoming trivial but I believe these can be avoided. The theory demonstrates the need for a proper archeology of art describing the way in which the definition of art has developed. Both Kristeller and Tatarkiewicz began such a project but it ended much too soon and it was too Euro-centric to offer a complete archeology. Nevertheless these two works tells us more about the definition of art than most of the philosophy on the subject.


The Ontology of Fakes

Art forgery presents a problem to any philosopher attempting to provide a definition of art. It seems very hard to deny these works some status but one feels so disappointed by them. These are the two inclinations we have in the presence of a forged work, and they need to be reconciled. Our first inclination, when we merely “see it” is to think it is a good work if it has certain qualities we generally admire and vice versa. The second inclination is to feel cheated by the work and reject it. It seems hard if not impossible to take a position which would deny us one of these inclinations or that would challenge their validity. Instead, if we seek to reconcile the two inclinations it should be done wearily so as to not open our aesthetic theory to unnecessary strangeness.
Clive Bell is a vocal champion of the first position, which denies that the first inclination is not genuine. He holds that a forgery contains minor imperfections that we may not notice when the work was not described as a forgery. These small differences between a genuine and a forgery are enough to justify disliking the work once we find out it is a forgery. Perhaps, this is true and the imperceptible differences matter that much. Yet, in the case of the famous Dutch Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren his Vermeers were considered some of the best Vermeers until they were found out, it seems a little strange to retrospectively find significant flaws (Lessing 72). If Clive Bell seeks to conclude that we see perfection where there is imperfection, there should be no reason for him to also conclude that we may also see imperfection where there is perfection. The sword cuts both ways. Furthermore, masters’ works are often not masterly, yet we value these works higher than we do better works by lesser artists (Meyer 89-90). This demonstrates that we very often do not judge the works on their pure “aesthetic” qualities alone. If we are willing to accept a lesser work by an artist as a good work of art, why should we be unwilling to accept a minimally lesser work by a different artist as a good work of art?
Most philosophers try to separate different kinds of the judgments we can make about artworks. Even though splitting an artwork or our approach to it may reconcile the two inclinations we have about forgeries it may place the artwork in an ontologically strange position. Once you start describing an object as several different things it is hard to find something that would unify them all into one thing. An art object’s ontology, its status as a thing, would need to have a firm base or at least be able to provide us with a unifying concept that would allow us to talk about the art object as a thing.
Before turning to forgeries we first must consider the ontology of art objects. Philosophers draw a distinction between particular art objects and type art objects (Strawson 184). The particular is the individual, only one of which can exist. This most often applies to statues and paintings, things that have an individual aspect to them. Particular art objects are thought of as synonymous with a particular thing (Wollheim 4-5). Other things are best thought of as types with particular instances of that thing, examples would include novels, poems, plays etc. A type contains individual instances, tokens, that all have that type in common. To use Wollheim’s example Ulysses does not exist as any particular piece of paper. The copy I have of Ulysses is not Ulysses it is merely a token. No copy of Ulysses is Ulysses not even the original manuscript; if any of those were lost we would not lose Ulysses (Wollheim 5-10).
P.F. Strawson raises the objection that we cannot fully think of particular art objects as particulars but we must think of all objects as types (Strawson 182-184). Even though we may not be able to make perfect imitations of existing art objects that does not mean we can logically distinguish between particular art objects and types, everything is a type. Strawson requires that we take, for example the Mona Lisa, and by reproducing it perfectly we would have two instances of the same type. It is logically possible that we can reproduce the Mona Lisa perfectly, thus it would have the status of a type. Perhaps we do not have to go to Strawson’s extreme, if we can reproduce the Mona Lisa even imperfectly does that alone than not designate it as a type?
Levinson (What a musical work is) points out that musicians interpreting a piece of music often change it. As long as they do not change it too much, as long as they do not go against the explicit directions of the composer they do not change the musical piece. As long as the correct number of instruments is preserved than the piece is an accurate token, one missing clarinet and the piece fails. I think that even Levinson holds his position too strongly and with no reason to stop short of the absurd, would the piece fail as a token if one of the members forgot to play a certain section or if someone’s clarinet’s reed had a slight chip, or was not properly wet. Levinson seems to this point only in passing, he says that we may wonder which clarinet will do better, one from 1800 or 1970? But if he is willing to be stringent enough to set the amount of instruments should he not be stringent enough to specify the instrument and all other conditions? Regardless, Levinson allows for variation as long as that variation is not at the expanse of what has been dictated by the composer. If we accept this variation for musical works can we not than accept reproductions of paintings and forgeries as variations on a theme?
Levingson in perhaps anticipation of this point argues that if two works are identical but are produced by two different authors they are two different works. If we were to set this argument aside for the time being we can argue that a reproduction of the Mona Lisa does not change anything essential to the artwork or does it? We still have the idea of the Mona Lisa and for most it may be sufficient. Perhaps we may not want to accept a reproduction in a book for the Mona Lisa but other paintings whose painter, as Edward Wind accuses, make their paintings to be easily reproduced in an art books. Even if we accept that book printing is insufficient and we would only accept something that could “fool” most art critics; we should at least be willing to accept that imperfect reproductions should be seen as tokens. Furthermore the existence of multiple tokens of a painting should not be relegated to the merely logically possible.
I now wish to turn to two different methods of “splitting up” works of art as a way to reconcile our two inclinations about fakes. Alfred Lessing represents the first view of splitting a work. He examines what is necessary for a work to be considered original in a strong sense using five different understandings of originality. A fake fails the last and crucial moment, that it must have creative originality. I will then turn to Mark Sagoff who goes beyond Lessing. Colin Redford also “splits up” works but he is less concerned with this splitting up than he is with distancing himself from Bell, Goodman, and Beardsley. Because of his concern he only provides a very broad and imprecise theory.
Lessing uses Van Meegeren’s The Disciples at Emmaus in his discussion to represent the most successful of original fakes. This work is a fake that sought to be seen as a Vermeer. For a time it was considered one of the greatest Vermeers and it was exhibited in Boymans Museum in Rotterdam until it was uncovered (Lessing 64). Lessing grants this work four qualities: 1) particularity; 2) originality to distinguish it from other works; 3) originality which adds something new to the body of art at large; and 4) original in a stronger sense than 3 ie. greatness. A work does not need to be any of these to be a work of art (even though 1 is somewhat trivial ); these are a testament to its originality. A work does not have to be original, but great works seem to demand it and The Disciples professes to be a great work. The fifth sense of originality is that a work must have an achievement which goes further than other works which precede it. This is in a sense a historical context, but it is also a point about technique. The technique must be novel for the work to be considered original. The Disciples is not original in this last regard because it cannot be seen as an improvement of, or a comment on a previous work of art (Lessing 69-75).
Sagoff holds that “many aesthetic quality relations have the form of attributives: they are two place relations” (Sagoff 133). Two place relations are for example: a greenish-yellow banana is yellow compared to a leaf vegetable; or Robert Redford is handsome compared to everyone else. Describing something as something requires something else to which it can be compared. Fakes may have all the attributes of art but they will not share those with an original work of art, because the stylistic qualities that they both posses are routed in two different reference classes. A reference classes is a group or a category to which a certain thing belongs. For example to say that Robert Redford is beautiful is a relation in the same way was to say that the Taj Mahal is beautiful but these two relations belong to two different classes. Robert Radford is a man and the Taj Mahal is a building. Even though we are using the same word, beautiful, we would be talking nonsense when we said that one is more beautiful than the other. No comparison can exist between two different classes.
Sagoff holds that a work of art belongs to one reference class and a forgery to another. This will allow him to say that we cannot talk and compare genuine paintings and forgeries because we lack any good grounds on which to discuss these works (Sagoff 131-6 All citations by Sagoff will refer to The Forger’s Art). The only way we would be able to compare forgeries and originals is as paintings, which Sagoff terms “useless” because it is too broad of relation (Sagoff 135).
A work of art such as Van Gogh’s Night Café (to use Sagoff’s example) has a certain style that is unique to that artwork. The style identifies a work of art as existing at one time, place, and is the result of one specific artist. Sagoff considers style an aesthetic quality as long as what style gives a painting is acting aesthetically. The property that Night Café is an “everyday tavern scene” is both a stylistic property and an aesthetic property. The stylistic properties somehow maps on to an aesthetic property.
Then Sagoff posits something very strange he holds that: “If a painting has an aesthetic feature a quality which is characteristic of an author, school, or period, that feature will not count as stylistic, however, unless the panting also belongs to that class” having already followed Goodman in assuming that “style consists in those features of the symbolic functioning of a work characteristic of author, period, place or school” (Sagoff 136-7). We should hesitate in granting Sagoff both points; it seems he may be begging the question. We have already seen that the “features of the symbolic functioning of a work,” style, map on to aesthetic properties. Yet, these features, or this style, can only be determined by knowing “author, period, place or school.” To than go back and separate the style of an author period, place or school from the reference class is to assume the very thing you are trying to prove. For example we would considered works done in a certain style as post-Impressionistic if they have certain attributes, not because it was done at a certain spatiotemporal location by a group of individuals.
Art historians may use spatial temporal qualifiers to determine the style of a painting but those relations are not enough, otherwise you could not have simultaneous art styles. The styles have to be distinguished by certain characteristics. Sagoff’s point is that if someone painted in the post-Impressionist style today we would not consider it a post-Impressionist painting because that area has ended, those considerations are no longer aesthetically relevant or at least their status has changed. A forgery “merely repeats the solution to a problem already solved” (Sagoff 146). But so do paintings in the style of post-Impressionism and nobody would consider them forgeries, merely unoriginal as Lessing has already established.
Sagoff follows Kant in comparing the sounds of a nightingale and the sounds of a mischievous boy imitating a nightingale. These two sounds even though they may sound the same differ due to their authors, thus they have a different style. Sagoff argues that the relational qualities of the sounds, the style, which we have granted and has mapped on to aesthetic qualities makes these sounds different. Once we are able to uncover the source of the sounds we are able to determine that we have a reason to privilege one sound over the other on aesthetic grounds. We would have no way to relate the boy’s sound to the bird’s even though it has the same harmonic features. Let us grant that Sagoff does not beg the question and he is able to convince us to see stylistic differences as aesthetic differences, how would that than alter the way we think of a work’s ontology?
We should be more than willing to grant that the same sound existing as two different tokens is the same type very broadly. Furthermore it seems we should accept that a certain type-technique could have two or more different tokens. To return to the post-Impressionist painting and paining in the style of a post-Impressionist painting. The token techniques in both these paintings refer to the same technique even though they are separated by spatiotemporal considerations. Sagoff seems to want to deny that these techniques are tokens of the same type, or perhaps that there are enough other considerations that would negate that two different paintings share the same type identities. Sagoff wants to make the stronger claim, claiming that if any aesthetic relevant similarities existed between forgeries and paintings they would either be trivial or ignorable (Sagoff 143-4). Sagoff must maintain that the token techniques are qualitatively different and are in fact not token techniques, and he does this based on spatiotemporal considerations.
If we allow Sagoff to deny that seemingly similar techniques are qualitatively different we must add another element to the ontology of paintings, something that we cannot gleam from merely perceiving them. Both Sagoff and Goodman raise problems with the idea of merely seeing a work and what that entails (Sagoff 149-150, Goodman 94-5). But we can grant them the strongest sense of the word even though we may not need to do this. But how are aphysical considerations attached to a painting’s identity?
If we reject the physicality of paintings it would be considerably easier to argue that there are aphysical elements to paintings, but than we should also have no problem with fakes that are tokens of that type (as previously argued). Unless of course we talk to Levinson who would argue that the same work composed by two different authors would be two different works. It would seem that Sagoff would use that argument as well for the same reason. Works have a historical context that is deemed as important as their perceptive qualities. When we look at a work we should not only see what is before us but all the history that it encompasses. If we accept this there seems to be no reason to go beyond Lessing and assert that fakes lack originality, but they fall under the same reference class. The essence of differential calculus does not change regardless if either Newton or Leibniz is the author.
If we resolve these considerations there is still a problem. How can a work of art maintain anything else besides its type identity through time? As things that lack memory, artworks cannot maintain their own identities, but there would be no objection to having someone else maintain artworks’ identities for them. In fact if a work of art is purely nonphysical in all respects its identity through time is entirely dependent on the existence of physical things that can maintain its identity through time. We should now ask ourselves which elements are essential to an artwork’s identity. If we lose the type we would lose the work, but if we lose everything else we can still have an artwork. Thus it seems that even if an artwork has different elements to its identity the only essential one is its existence as a type. It would seem strange to conclude that both are equally essential for its existence. Even though we know there was a Colossus of Rhodes we do not have the work itself. We cannot say the work still exists even though we have the work in a historical sense. That sense does not allow us to make what we would consider aesthetic judgments.
Even if we are to grant the above argument we can allow for both our inclinations. We are justified in rejecting a work because it lacks something inherent in great works, the spatiotemporal-historical element. We are justified in rejecting fakes on more than merely psychological grounds avoiding Beardsley’s criticism against similar veins of this critique (Notes on Forgery). But it also allows us to be justified in thinking that a fake is a good piece of art because its type identity is more essential to its identity than the spatiotemporal-historical element. It seems that we are able to reconcile our intuitions about fakes without having to feel guilty about condemning or praising them, because in some regard we are justified to do either.