The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Volume 68 Issue 2 2010 [Doi...

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AMIE L. THOMASSON

Ontological Innovation in Art

What sort of a thing is a work of art? When doesa work of art come into existence, when is it dam-aged, when does it survive, and when is it de-stroyed? Which features are essential to it andwhich expendable? Is it the sort of thing that canbe seen by people in Cleveland, Los Angeles, andSingapore at the same time, or do you have totravel to a unique location to see it?

These are all questions regarding the ontologyof the work of art. As I shall understand it here,the ontological status of a work of art is funda-mentally fixed by its existence, identity, and persis-tence conditions; these fix whatcategoryof objectit is. In fixing these, other facts may be fixed as

well, including when and where a work is observ-able, what properties of the work are essential oraccidental, what sorts of change interfere with itspreservation, and so on.

Many different answers have been proposed tothe question What is the ontological status of thework of art? These range from claims that a workof art is a physical object (which, perhaps, must beseen in person at a particular place and partic-ular time and preserved with its visible propertiesintact to survive), to claims that it is not a physicalobject at all, but rather an action (of an artist) or ageneraltype of action, to those who (with Sartre)think of works of art as imaginary objectsdistinctfrom any real objects or activities.1

Others have doubted that a single answer isavailable.2 It might seem that the answer may dif-fer for a work of visual art (say, a painting, whichwe cannot all see in the flesh at the same time,if we are in different cities, and which may beburnt up in a fire or suffer other forms of physi-cal degeneration) and a symphony (which we canall hear performed in different cities at the same

time, which cannot burn up, which does not re-

quire restoration). Nonetheless, it might still seemthat the answers are fairly easy to come by forthese different branches of artseparating out,say, paintings from symphonies.

But they become more difficult again when welook at more recent forms of artfor, even if welimit our interest to the visual arts, it seems thatthere is an ever more diverse range of answers toquestions like those we began with. Some works,like Liz Magors Time and Mrs. Tiber, were de-signed to be left to decayits degenerative pro-gression is part of the work (in a way it is not withtraditional paintings, however destructible).3 Sim-ilarly, the cracks and chips that appear in Walead

Beshtys Fed Ex Large Box during shipping donot damage the work but instead are integral to it.Others, like Sol LeWitt wall drawings, are permit-ted to be installed by different painters in differ-ent museums, with varying visual formsso thatagain preserving surface features is inessential.For other works still, like Felix Gonzalez-TorressUntitled, there is no continuous physical basis atall needed for the work to survive: the candies thatmake up the work are meant to be eaten by view-ers, and may be replaced while the work persists.4

Considering cases like these can shake us outof our complacency in thinking thatat least ifwe limit our focus to particular branches of art,say, visual artquestions about the ontology of arthave easy or obvious answers. They might insteadpush us back to ask the deeper question: what is itthat determineswhat does, and does not, count aspart of a work of art, when a work does and doesnot survive, what counts as damage, destruction,preservation, restoration?

Elsewhere I have argued for the general viewthat the existence, identity, and persistence con-

ditions of paintings, sculptures, symphonies, and

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68:2 Spring 2010c 2010 The American Society for Aesthetics



120 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

other familiar kinds of art are, at bottom, estab-lished stipulatively by the beliefs and practices ofthose who ground and reground the reference ofthe relevant sortal terms.5 I will begin by giving abrief overview of the general kind of answer Iveargued for. But the purpose of this article is todiscuss an interesting consequence that falls outof that view, namely, that there is no set answerto the question of the ontological status of a workof art; instead, it may vary over place and time,and works of art of ontologically new kinds maybe introduced. Showing how works of art of on-tologically new kinds can be introduced is itselfrevealing, as it once again will give support to thegeneral idea that such facts as there are about theontological status of works of art are, at bottom,

determined by human intentions and practices.6

i. the ontology of art kinds

What is it that determines what does and does notcount as part of a work of art, when a work comesinto existence, when it does and does not sur-vive, what counts as damage, destruction, preser-vation, restoration? We can ask this question intwo ways: using a familiar art-kind term such aspainting, sculpture, novel, or symphony, wecan ask what the ontological status of paintings(say) is, what their essential properties, identity,and survival conditions, and so on, are. Or we canuse a name or singular term for a work of art,asking: what is the ontological status ofGuernica,ofHaystacks, or ofTime and Mrs. Tiber, Fed ExLarge Box, and so forth.

Most of the discussion in the literature thus farhas concerned art kinds. Here I will begin withthat question, and then move on to the more dif-ficult second question. I have argued elsewhere

that the ontological status of paintings, sculptures,symphonies, and other familiar kinds of art is, atbottom, established stipulatively by thebeliefs andpractices of those who ground and reground thereference of the relevant sortal terms.7 Establish-ing the ontological status of works of a given kindis a matter of determining the most basic condi-tions under which works of that kind come into ex-istence, persist, or are destroyed. These, of course,are the sorts of features that enter into commondebates about, for example, whether works of

painting are physical objects or abstract patterntypes or action types that can survive the destruc-

tion of the canvas, whether works of music shouldbe understood as being created and so as com-ing into existence at a certain time, or rather asPlatonistic abstracta, and so on.

Though I do not have the space to argue againfor that view here, the basic idea is that when weask questions about the ontology of art like whendoes a painting survive? and must a novel becreated? we are using terms like painting andnovel. So we can rephrase the question as askingwhat (ontological) sort of thing the terms paint-ing and novel pick out. But given the qua prob-lem, we could at least attempt to refer to a greatmany different (ontological) sorts of things withany term we introduce; we could intend our termto refer to the physical marks on the surface of

the canvas, to the three-dimensional object witha certain weight, to the (replicable) visual patternon its surface, to the kind of technique or actionused to produce it, to the space on the wall, andso on.8 The question what sort of thing is a paint-ing? for example, is only answerable to the extentthat the way the reference of the term is grounded(and regrounded) disambiguates the ontology bydetermining the general kind or category of entitythat the term is to refer to if it refers at all.

The needed disambiguation, I have argued, isprovided as long as the terms in question (paint-ing, novel, and the like) are genuine sortal terms.A sortal term is a term that comes with some ba-sic rules of use of two kinds: first, basic applicationconditions, laying out conceptually relevant con-ditions in which painting may be successfully ap-plied (thus yielding existence conditions for paint-ings), and second, basic co-application conditionsthat give rules for determining when the term maybe reapplied to one and the same thing (yieldingidentity conditions for paintings).9 The applica-tion conditions and co-application conditions to-

gether yield persistence conditions for paintings.10So, in short, on this view the most basic facts aboutthe ontology of paintings (their existence, identity,and persistence conditions) are determined by theapplication and co-application conditions associ-ated with the sortal term painting.11

One consequence of this view is that debatesabout the ontological status of even traditionalsorts of artworks of music, painting, literature,and so onmust in some sense be resolved by an-alyzing the concepts of those who ground and re-

ground the reference of the term. But the senseof conceptual analysis at issue here has to be



Thomasson Ontological Innovation in Art 121

understood carefully. For the determination ofreference of our common terms seems to be es-tablished mostly not by little pictures or phrasesexplicitly entertained in the heads of competentspeakers, but rather by the practices of those whouse the terms and deal with the objects, includingthe conditions under which we consider a work tobe observable (as, for example, a painting may beseen this month at the museum, a performance ofa musical work may be heard tonight only, whilethe work itself may be heard in any of three majorcities any night this month), when we consider itto be destroyed (as, for example, a fire may de-stroy a painting but not a symphony), what weconsider to be saleable and moveable (the workversus rights to it or copies of it), and so on. These

practices, which naturally co-evolve with the useof category-specifying art terms like painting andsymphony, play the core role in disambiguatingthe ontological status of the kinds of works of artwe commonly refer to (both in language and inour other dealings with them), and so (I have ar-gued), figuring out the ontological status of worksof art of these kinds must go by way of analyzingthe practices involved in talking about and deal-ing with works of these kinds.12 So we have herea view on which the ontological status of things ofthe relevant kind is determined by human inten-tions and practices of a certain kind (understand-ing those intentions not as private mental statesbut as publicly available through our normativepractices in applying and refusing terms and intreating works as the same or different, buyable,sellable, moveable, and so on).

But not all general nouns are sortal terms, andso not all questions about the ontological statusof Gs (where G is a general noun) are answer-able. A noun such as gift, for example, may failto be category specifying, as my gift to you might

be a T-shirt, a trip to the beach, a new haircut, ora poem I have written for you. It seems that thegeneric term art or work of art is like gift inthis regard: work of art appears not to be cat-egory specifying, since it is applied indifferentlyto physical individuals, processes, performances,abstract works of music, and so on. It is perhapsthis feature that has led to what David Davies hascalled the orthodoxy of ontological pluralism.13

If art is indeed not category specifying, then itwould be misguided to assume that there must be

a single ontological kind for all works of artthatall, say, must really be physical objects, or action-

types, or abstract structures, or the like. The use ofthe common term art should not lead us to sup-pose that there must be a single ontological kindcommon to all works of art.14

That leads, in turn, to the interesting conclu-sion that there may in principle be more onto-logical kinds of art than are recognized by us asour familiar art kinds and named by our familiarart-kind terms. If different cultures have differ-ent category-specifying art-kind terms and differ-ent individuative and evaluative practices that goalong with these, there may be correspondinglydifferent kinds of works of art.15 It also leavesopen the idea that works of new ontological kindsmay be introduced within an artistic tradition.But what makes it possible to introduce works

of art of ontologically new kinds, and what deter-mines the ontological status of these innovativeworks?

ii. the ontology of the individual work

To answer this question, we first need to answerthe question of what determines the ontologicalkind an individual work of art belongs to, sincewe could then hope to show how there could bea first work of a new ontological kind. I thinksome progress may be made if we start again fromfamiliar cases and see what light they can shed onthe unfamiliar cases.

To inquire about the ontological status of anindividualwork of art we must have some way ofreferring to it, or else we cannot pose the questionat all. But just as the reference of general termssuch as painting and symphony must be dis-ambiguated by speakers, so similarly to engage insingular reference to a work (and inquire about itsontological status), whoever it is who is referring

to it must establish what ontologicalsortof thingis to be referred to by the name (or other singu-lar term). Questions about the ontological statusof an individual work (like those about art kinds)only have determinate answers to the extent thatthose who ground and reground the reference ofthe term determine the answers in determiningwhat sort of thing is to be named if the term refersat all.

So if we use a singular term (a name like Guer-nica or David, or an indexical like that work

of art), what establishes what ontological sort ofthing it refers to? In at least one central thread




of usage, we use art as an essentially artifactualterm, where an essentiallyartifactual term is onefor which any member of the kind must be theproduct of an intention to create that verysort ofobject.16 So in attempting to refer to that work ofart, or to Guernica, we generally mean to referto the entity the artist intentionally created,17 torefer to whatever the artist referred to. In short,the public use of names for works of art (suchas Guernica or David) generally defers to theartists original way of picking out the work, and sothe artist is aptly considered the grounder of thenames reference.18 (Even if the artist does notgive her work a proper name, she fairly clearlyrefers to her work in considering it, reworking it,presenting it, and so on. Issues of reference in

thought parallel those for language.)19But how does the artist establish what sort of

thing she refers to, in attempting to (singularly)refer to her work of art? Normally, the referenceof names is ontologically disambiguated by treat-ing the name as a name for a certain sort (or morebroadly, category) of thing (for example, for a per-son, place, holiday, highway, and so on). As I havesuggested above, however, art and artwork arenot category-specifying terms, so treating a nameas a name for the work of art here will not disam-biguate the ontological category of entity to whichthe name refers.

Instead, artists normally disambiguate the ref-erence of our names for works of art by treatingthese as names for certain sortsof worksfor ex-ample, intending Guernica to be a painting name,David to be a sculpture name, and so on. In thatcase the artist may rely on the general practices ofthe community that establish what (ontologicallyspeaking) a painting, dance, or symphony is andthus set up the broad existence, identity, and per-sistence conditions for the work she creates and

establishes singular reference to.

iii. unfamiliar kinds of art

But what about cases in which the name is notused to refer to a work of a familiar art kind, withestablished individuative practices in the commu-nity that can be appealed to disambiguate the on-tological status of the work referred to? A won-derful range of examples arises in the area of

Internet art, since here the practices are just inthe process of emerging, and the very ontolog-

ical form of the Internet (as itself not spatiallylocated, but created, changeable, and multiply ac-cessible) makes the emergence of new ontologicalcategories ofart likely in a way that other advancesin technology (for example, the advent of acrylicpaints) did not. Given the newness of the mate-rial, perhaps it is best to begin with some examples,though thecases surely willnot provide an exhaus-tive list of kinds (or potential kinds) of Internetart.

Thomson and Craigheads (1998) Triggerhappysets up a traditional game of Space Invaders,where the invading force, however, is not aliensbut rather the words of Foucaults essay What Isan Author?words which may be shot to obliv-ion one by one, if you can get them before their

squiggly bombs get you.20 Another work, JaneProphet, Gordon Selley, and Mark Hurrys Tech-nosphere, allowed users to design virtual crea-tures, which inhabit a virtual environment andcompete for survival and reproduction over thelong term.21 While there was consistency in termsof the visual style, rules, and goals of the game, theactual content of what appeared on users screenswas vastly variable based on the strategies andskills of the participants.

Other works of Internet art seem to have noconsistent content whatsoever, but rather are ap-plied to do things to other Websites (chosen bythe viewer or arbitrarily selected). Mark NapiersShredder, for example, takes any extant Web pageand virtually shreds it, yielding a shredded ver-sion of the page.22 A work by Mark Daggett,Car-nivore Is Sorry(2001), tracks a users visits whileWeb surfing, then emails him or her a postcardwith an image composed by compressing and blur-ring into vertical lines versions of all the Websiteshe or she has visited.23

In cases like these, there seems to be no great

mystery how works of these new types may comeinto existence. In traditional cases, the grounder ofa names reference may treat the name as a namefor a member of a recognized kind ofart(painting,sculpture, dance) and rely on the practices for thatart kind to provide the ontological disambiguationof the kind of thing to be referred to. What seemsto be happening in the sort of cases just outlined isthat the name used to refer to the individual workis associated with a different ontological kindfamiliar, though not from the artworld. Thus, for

example, the names Triggerhappy and Techno-sphere seem to be names for video games(which




are art), so that theindividuative practices suitableforcomputergames aretacitly brought into play tohelp disambiguate the reference (just as those forpaintings are invoked for the name Guernica).

Carnivore Is Sorry and Shredder seem to benames for a certain kind of programpresumably,like other computer programs such as MicrosoftWord and Adobe Photoshop, at least in part in-dividuated in terms of their functional capaci-ties and origin. By using these as names for pro-grams (which are art), there is implicit appeal tothe individuative conditions suitable for computerprograms, and these conditions can tacitly sup-ply identity and persistence conditions suitablefor these works of art. In cases like these, then,what we have is new ontological kinds of artbe-

ing created, but not new ontological kinds of thingsimpliciterbeing created. Instead, a familiar kindof entity (a computer game or program) is intro-ducedasart.

iv. new kinds of art

But there are other cases where such easy solu-tions are not availablewhere it does not seemthat the name is a name for something of anyfamiliar ontological kind. Below are some otherexamples of Internet art where the terms do notseem to be referring to works of either familiar artkinds or familiar kinds such as computer games orprograms.

Some works of Internet art clearly draw on ex-isting traditions of visual art and narrative, butexploit the nonlinear links and interactive pos-sibilities of the Internet to create works with adistinct structure. Olia Lialinas (1996) work MyBoyfriend Came Back from the War, for example,consists of a mixture of text and images, the first

set of which appears as a black page with a singlelink line saying, My boyfriend came back fromthe War. After dinner they left us alone.24 Click-ing the link brings one to a page of two image links,and clicking on one of those reveals further links,in increasingly fine-grained arrays of frames, someof which reveal images and some text, making adisorienting assemblage of snatches of conversa-tion and views until at last all are exhausted indarkness.

Similar works use only text, as in NowHere/Nowhere

, by Brighid Lowe (http://www.e-2.org/c-ship/projects/nowhere/apbl.html), which

highlights the Internet surfers experience of timein a work that scrolls phrases across the screen ex-cruciatingly slowly, with comments like You, youmust be bored? or only visuals, as in the caseof a work by Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and DirkPaesmans) entitled Index.html (1996), whichprovides screens of unstable images of code andcolor, seemingly turning the Web inside outto bring the base-structural code to the surfaceand suppress any user-friendly recognizable im-ages or signposted links (links may still be found,but clicking on them just reveals more pages ofodd visual displays).25

Drawing on the tradition of readymades, usingfound objects as art, other Internet artists havemade works based on linking, framing, or oth-

erwise highlighting extant material on the Web.Alexei ShulginsArt Medal(19951997) selects arange of external Websites, presents these virtualprizes as found art, framing them in gold, listinggrounds for the award (for example, For cor-rect use of pink colors, For sincerity) and some-times appending pieces of found criticism fromother sites.26 By now, most of the links are bro-ken, so that clicking on them yields only a framedversion of the This page cannot be displayedmessage.

What determines the existence, identity, andpersistence conditions for works such as these?If we employ a name such as Index.html andask what the ontological status of this work is,in treating that as a name for a work of art, wenormally would mean to refer to the work theartist referred to with the name. But the artist(or whoever grounds the use of the name) can-not disambiguate reference by treating the nameas a name for a work of a familiar art kind, orof another extant kind such as games or pro-grams, to provide tacit frame-level criteria for

existence, identity, and persistence for the workcreated.

We could say that without such backgroundpractices for an extant kind to rely on, the namesare just ontologically ambiguous, and there areno facts of the matter, for example, about theidentity and persistence conditions of the worksthey refer to. But there does not seem to be anyway of treating it as a genuine name for a workwhile considering the ontological status of the ref-erent to be completely indeterminate. Even sim-

ple discussion of and critical discourse about thework relies on some tacit views about when two




individuals are talking about (and perhaps dis-agreeing about the merits or interpretation of) thesame work.Moreover, artists, museums,and Inter-net art sites must make decisions about the condi-tions under which they can claim to exhibit or pre-serve the work, which requires some assumptionsabout conditions under which the work would andwould not be observable and would or would notpersist. In short, if the ontological status of thereferent were really left completely ontologicallyindeterminate, the term could not function as astandard work name at all.

As a result, there is a need for ontological dis-ambiguation, and insofar as the reference of thename cannot be disambiguated by associating itwith a familiar kind, boundaries and survival con-

ditions for the work must be established by othermeans. This may be done more or less explic-itly; for example, the artist may explicitly stipulatethe relevant conditions for preserving her work.Thus, for example, one of the most important cu-rated Websites of Internet art, Rhizome, includesa lengthy Artists Intent questionnaire for artistssubmitting their workasking artists about whatthey see as the essential features of their workand how it is to be preserved. In it, they outlinediverse strategies for preserving works of Internetart in spite of anticipated changes in hardware andsoftware:

1. documentation (e.g., screen shots)

2. migration (e.g., updating code)

3. emulation (a way to run old software on new plat-

forms)

4. reinterpretation (re-creating your work or documen-

tation in a new technological environment)27

They then lay out a series of features, asking the

artist how important it is that each be preserved inmigrating, emulating, or reinterpreting the work:

1. How important is it that your project looks the same

(display size, color depth, hues, saturation, contrast,

composition, etc.)?

2. How important is it that your project moves the same

(frame rate, frames per second, etc.)?

3. How important is it that your projects interactivity

remains the same (rollovers, links, user input, etc.)?28

This begins to give some idea of the apparentlyopen parameters for what sorts of feature may (or

may not) be essential to a work of Internet art,including visual (or auditory) appearance, timing,and motion (as in Now Here/Nowhere), interactiv-ity potentialities and methods (as inIndex.html),links to other sites (context) (as in ArtAwards),use of hardware or software basis (someworks exploit bugs of familiar programs), andso on.

I think it is clear that at least many of theseworks are things of different ontological kindsfrom those of traditional worksdiffering from(for example) paintings in lacking an essentialconnection to a single physical basis, differingfrom narratives and video in having a linear or-der inessential (though linking structures may beessential) while features like means of interactiv-

ity and context (as part of a fully linked-up Web)may be essential, and so on. It is also interest-ing just how varied the potential ontological kindsare which may be developed under the generalrubric of Internet artInternet art, like art it-self, seems not to be a category-specifying term,as works with many incompatible sets of identityand persistence conditions could fall under thisheading.29

But what I think is particularly interesting hereis that where we cannot (tacitly) participate in andappeal to extant practices (for familiar kinds) toontologically disambiguate a names reference, wehave to find other ways to specify which featuresare to be considered essential to the work of art.In this respect, these cases are in clear contrastwith cases of traditional art forms such as painting,where practices may be relied on to make it clearthat, for example, surface pigments are relevantto the works preservation and stretcher strips arenot (at least unless explicitly specified otherwise).They are, however, quite similar to cases of otherontologically innovative works of art, such as Tor-

ress Untitled, which comes with explicit instruc-tions allowing the consumption and replacementof the constitutive candies.

So far I have dealt with the extreme cases oneach end: in cases of traditional painting, it seems,nothing needs to be said; our background prac-tices do all the work in fixing which featuresare and are not part of the work (the front butnot the back is to be viewed, the painting de-grades to the extent that the visible markingson its front surface do, and so forth). In cases

of ontologically novel forms of art, it seems thatthe essential and inessential features and survival




conditions for the work often have to be explicitlystipulated.

Sherri Irvins very useful notion of the artistssanction may, however, enable us to see a unityacross these varied cases. The artists sanction,on Irvins view, involves the artists publicly ac-cessible actions and communications, as deliv-ered in certain contexts with certain conventions.30

These may involve something as mundane as pre-senting a painting to a gallery or as novel asgiving instructions for installing and preservinga work. The sanctions, however delivered, fixthe boundaries of [the artists] work, . . . deter-mine whether a particular feature is relevant tothe works interpretation, . . . establish in whatgenre the work belongs, and, in some cases, . . .

determine whether it,quaartwork, has a particu-lar feature or not.31 This suggests a global ap-proach that can cover both the traditional andinnovative cases: that what establishes the onto-logical status of an individual work is the artistssanction.

In cases of traditional works of art, the artistmay not need to say anything explicit: by pre-senting a painted canvas with a particular set ofvisible features, for instance, the artist typicallysanctions a corresponding set of visible featuresfor the artwork.32 So, for example, if an artist ina context of traditional Western painting presentsa canvas, framed, with paint on the front to anart gallery for exhibition, we can (in the absenceof any counter-indications from the artist) takethe artist to have sanctioned treating this as atraditional painting, whose relevant features (quawork of art) are on the front surface, which areto be preserved (as far as possible) in the statein which they arrive. Put in my terms, she estab-lishes that her name for the work, say Jones No. 5(along with other singular terms intended to refer

to that very work of art), is to refer to a paint-ing, where the ontological status of paintings isdetermined by the background practices of thosecompetent in using the term and dealing with theobjects.

In more innovative cases, where there are notsuch background conventions to rely on (or wherethese are being violated), the artist may need todo something more to make it clear what does anddoes not count as an exhibition of her work, underwhat conditions it survives, and so on. This may

be done rather explicitly, for example, by fillingin an artists intent form like that on Rhizome

or adding a clarifying statement to the work (forexample, Sol LeWitt insists that instructions beexhibited alongside his murals). Or it may be donethrough actions rather than words, as the artistmayset up thefirst display herself, correct or rejectattempted displays by various galleries, make itclear how many institutions may display the workat one time, and so on.

In any case, whether verbally or nonverbally,the artist may make it clear under what condi-tions she will accept that her work is (properly)displayed or instruct curators about how her workis to be displayed (and under what conditions adisplay would count as the work at all), whether,and if so, in what ways, her work is to be preserved(which features must be preserved and which need

not or even must not be preserved), and so on. Allof this amounts to a specification of the ontologi-cal status of the work createdwhat does and doesnot count as a part or feature of it, qua work of art;under what conditions it is damaged; under whatconditions it survives; what counts as an exhibitionof this very work; and so onis all, on this view,determined by the artists sanction.33 Of course,some questions may remain unanswered and, asa result, the ontological status of the work mayremain in certain regards indeterminatebut thatis no different from what happens in other areasof ontology.34

One aspect of Irvins understanding of theartists sanction may raise worries, however: herrequirement that the artists intentions be madepublicly accessible. For suppose (to develop a lineof objection aptly raised by Lindsey Fiorelli) thatan innovative artist like Liz Magor suddenly diesin her studio. Is it not conceivable that she had

just completed a work of art, but she had doneso without leaving a sanction that makes publicwhat was and was not supposed to count as the

work, when it would and would not survive? (Per-haps she writes in her journal: Ive just finishedStatic, my most important work to date, and thenpasses away.) On Irvins view, without a publiccommunication (either by participating in certainestablished conventions or by making explicit stip-ulations), no sanction has been established. For,Irvin insists, intention is not sufficient to estab-lish a sanction; endowing a work with certainfeatures via a sanction is like making a contract: itis public actions, not private intentions, that mat-

ter.

35

Yet it does seem natural to say that thereis such work as Static, which has certain (even if




vague) identity and persistence conditions, thoughwe may be unable to tell (from the mess left in thestudio) what does and does not count as part ofthe work, what its identity and persistence condi-tions were supposed to be, and so on. Irvin can,of course, allow that some works of art may beprivately completed: an artist may leave behindtraditional paintings that (by her participation inthe conventions of canvas wall paintings) clearlyhave a sanctioned ontological status, even if theynever leave the studio. But on Irvins view, it seemsthat more ontologically innovative works cannotexist without having a publicsanction.

One natural option is to allow that an actualsanction is not necessarythat instead it is whatthe artist sanctioned or (given minimal opportu-

nities, like surviving another week) would havesanctionedthat determines the ontological statusof her work. This, at least, seems fitting with howwe would behave in the hypothetical case: onecan imagine trying to figure out what is and is notsupposed to be part of the work Static and whatits survival conditions are by trying to figure out(based on what is in the studio along with theartists communications, known history, and con-text) what Magor herself would have sanctionedregarding it. What the artist would have sanc-tionedas counting as part of the work, preservingthe work, and so on, is presumably what she in-tended to be part of the work, a continuation of thework.

As a result, this proposal does allow that non-actualized intentions may be sufficient to fix theontological status of a work created, contrary toIrvins insistence that intentions that have neverbeen acted on have no effect on the works fea-tures, so it is worth examining why Irvin insiststhat the relevant intentions be part of a publicsanction.36 One important reason is that she is

clearly trying to distance herself from the prob-lematic forms of intentionalism in aestheticsparticularly those that would treat an artists in-tentions as fixing the meaning or value of a work.She does this in two ways: first, by requiring the in-tentions to bepublic; second, by insisting (rightly)that her view only entails that the artists inten-tions make a difference to what features a workhas or does not haveand when it does or does notsurvivein short, to what is the object to be inter-preted, not to its correct interpretation or value.

But the latter observation seems sufficient to saveher view from accusations of falling into unten-

able interpretive intentionalismso why add theinsistence on publicity?

One motivation may be that we do not want tohave to allow that an artists mere intention is rel-evant to the works ontological status if it is keptentirely private and conflicts with public practices.Thus, we might imagine that, unbeknownst to us,Mary Cassatt submitted The Boating Party to agallery in the usual way, in the nineteenth-centuryartistic context, with no special instructions, nocomplaints about its manner of exhibition, andso forth, but secretly intending the back of thecanvas to count as part of the work and relevantto its appraisal. In this case it does seem that(despite the supposed intention) the name TheBoating Party refers to a traditional (one-sided)

painting.But the above proposalthat what the artist

sanctioned or (given minimal opportunities)would have sanctioned determines the ontolog-ical status of the workdoes not tell us other-wise. Cassatt, by her actions, sanctioned treatingThe Boating Party as a traditional painting. Normust we say that, given minimal opportunities, shewould have sanctioned treating it differently, forshe had them and did not. In fact, given her ac-tions in the relevant context, we may even denythat she really intended to sanction treating theback as part of the work (just asregardless ofhis avowalwe would deny that Jones did not in-tend to insult Smith when he called him a snivel-ing maggot). An idle thought or wish does notan intention make, nor are our intentions alwayssecurely revealed to us by introspection or to oth-ers by avowal. Instead, as in legal contexts, a per-sons intentions must be interpreted against thebackground of her behavior (and dispositions tobehave) within a cultural and conventional con-text. In short, provided we employ a plausible

and sophisticated understanding of intentions, weneed not worry about allowing that what an artistintended to sanction or would have sanctionedmay play a role in fixing the ontological status ofcertain works, where a publicized sanction is notavailable.

In any case, regardless of whether we say it isonly the artistsactualsanction or allow that it iswhat the artist sanctioned or (given her intentions,properly understood)would have sanctionedthatis relevant to determining the ontological status of

her work, the key point for present purposes is thatit is the artist who determines what (ontological)




sort of thing she has created. According the artistthis role does not, however, mean neglecting thekey role of public practices in determining the on-tological status of works of art: in traditional cases,as discussed above, the artists mere participationin the relevant practices of, say, canvas paintingis sufficient to mark her work as having the iden-tity and persistence conditions of paintings. Evenin innovative cases, if the artists introduction issuccessful and the work influential, others maylatch onto the new rules (for example, for treat-ing things as perishable sculptures, repeatable andvariable wall paintings, and the like), and a newpublic practice may emerge that enables futureartists to simply participate in it and defer to therelevant rules of that practice, much as one can

defer to the practices of individuating traditionalpaintings on canvas.

In any case, the very idea that an artist may(through her sanction) determine the ontologi-cal status of her work and introduce an ontolog-ically new kind of work of art reemphasizes thegeneral point I have made elsewhere: that suchfacts as there are about the ontology of works ofart (whether of familiar or unfamiliar kinds) are,at bottom, determined by human intentions andpractices.37

v. ontology, interpretation, and evaluation

The above view, however, is likely to face a centralobjection: that we need not consult the artists in-tentions (whether in the form of a public sanctionor not) to determine the ontological status of thework of art; we canjust tellor at leastfigure outthemodal and kind properties of works of artevenin novel casesby interpreting the work, figuringout what its aesthetically and interpretively im-

portant features are, and inferring that those areits essential features.38 For example, what we aredoing in, for example, judging the timing essentialto Now Here/Nowhere, seems to be determiningwhat properties are essential by interpreting thework, and considering those properties essentialthat are most central to underpinning the worksartistic or aesthetic valuesor perhaps to realiz-ing what Davies calls the artistic statement artic-ulated in the work.39 This might be thought toundermine the idea that the artists (actual or in-

tended) sanction determines the ontologicalstatusof her workfor (it might be said) we can deter-

mine the ontological status of the work withouthaving to investigate what the artist sanctioned(or would have sanctioned).

But first, what we are doing when we engagein judging that, for example, timing is essentialto Now Here/Nowhere seems to be making a

judgment about what the artist would have sanc-tioned, given a certain principle of charity: thatthe artist would have wanted to create the bestwork possible, and that a work where timing wasessential to it (rather than an accident based onthe speed of my computer) would have greateraesthetic value. So this does not show that anartists (actual or intended) sanction is irrelevantto what counts as part of a work, but only that agood route to determining that may be by way of

charitably interpreting what would make the bestwork.

These considerations also seem to show that al-though there may not be category-specifying cri-teria of identity or preservation for works of art assuch, there may be a cross-categorial frame-levelcriterion invoked when we refer to something as awork of art, namely, that at least a necessary con-dition for the persistence of the same work of artis preserving all or most of the features on whichits artistic and aesthetic properties supervene.40

(Since these properties may be various in ontolog-ical kind, this is not a category-specific persistencecondition.)

But this approach does not provide a generalsolution to the problem of what determines theontological status of a work of art. For to interpretawork, we must begin with some understanding ofwhat is, and is not, part of the workor we may gobadly astray. For example, it does not seem that wecan interpret a work likeArt Medalindependentlyof knowing whether the externally linked pagesare part of the work; if they are, the work might be

interpreted as a commentary on the shallow, tackytriviality of the particular material presented, andif they are not (so that the work might surviveeven when all the originally selected pages comeup as This page cannot be displayed), it mightrather be emphasizing the transitory and unstablenature of the Web itself, in which case the bro-ken links reemphasize this.41 (Stallabrass reportsthat the creator of Art Medal, Alexei Shulgin,claims not to mind [about the broken links],saying that it reflects wider dysfunction in the

Net.)

42

As Irvin puts it, The artists sanction. . .

plays an ontological role in fixing features of the




artwork.. . .Insofar as interpretation must be re-sponsive to the works nature, the artists sanctionwill place some indirect constraints on interpreta-tion.43 As a result, we cannot rely on interpreta-tion to determine ontology, for proper interpreta-tion (and evaluation) of a work of art relies on aproper understanding of what is and is not part ofthe work.44

This leads to a final interesting observation: Theartists (actual or intended) sanction, in fixing theboundaries of a work of art (and thus its ontolog-ical status), does not merely fix descriptive factsabout what is and is not part of the work: it alsohasmodalandnormativeimport. Fixing the onto-logical status of a work of art goes hand in handwith fixing its modal features (what features are

essential and inessential, what sorts of change itcould and could not survive). Perhaps more in-terestingly still, fixing what is and is not part ofthe work also determines normative features: es-tablishing how the work is to be displayed, to beconserved, and what is and is not to be consid-ered relevant for interpretation and evaluation.45

(Although this is of course not to say that theartist in any way determines what the proper in-terpretation or evaluation of her work is, only thatshe determines what counts as the object to-be-interpreted.)46

In sum, then, I have argued that the ontolog-ical status of works of art is, at bottom, fixed byhuman intentions and practices. The ontologicalstatus of such general, familiar art kinds as paint-ings and symphonies is established by the beliefsand practices of those who ground and regroundthe reference of these general terms. The onto-logical status of an individual work of art is de-termined, at bottom, by the artists (actual or in-tended) sanction, though there may be quite awide range of cases, from those in which the artist

simply participates in a range of background prac-tices for works of a familiar kind (as someone justmakes a painting and presents it) through to novelcases where at least some of the identity and per-sistence conditions must be more explicitly sanc-tioned by the artist.47 But these variations shouldnot obscure the general point that the ontolog-ical status of a work of art is, at bottom, deter-mined by human intentions and practices; wherebackground practices leave off, explicit stipula-tion must take over, if there are to be ontological

facts of the matter at all. And where novel criteriafor preservation and identification are sanctioned,

works of art of ontologically novel kinds may beintroduced.48

AMIE L. THOMASSON

Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Miami

Coral Gables, Florida 33124-4670

internet:[email protected]

1. David Daviesdefends the actionviewin hisArt as Per-formance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). For the action-type hypothesis, see Gregory Currie, An Ontology of Art(New York: St. Martins Press, 1989); for the view thatworks of art are imaginary objects, see Jean-Paul Sartre,The Psychology of Imagination, trans. Bernard Fechtman(New York: Washington Square Press, 1966).

2. Those others include Richard Wollheim, Art and ItsObjects(Cambridge University Press, 1980); Nelson Good-man, Languages of Art(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976); SherriIrvin, The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks, inNew Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and KatherineThomson-Jones (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), pp. 119; and myself in The Ontologyof Art, in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 7892.

3. See Sherri Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contem-porary Art,The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63(2005): 315326.

4. See also Irvins The Artists Sanction in Contempo-rary Art.

5. See my The Ontology of Art, and The Ontology ofArt and Knowledge in Aesthetics, The Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism63 (2005): 221229.

6. For further defense of this idea,see my The Ontologyof Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics.

7. The Ontology of Art and The Ontology of Art andKnowledge in Aesthetics.

8. For discussion of the qua problem, see Michael DevittandKim Sterelny, Languageand Reality, 2nded. (MIT Press,1999), pp. 7981, 9093; and my Ordinary Objects (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 3844.

9. SeeOrdinary Objects,pp. 3942.10. For further discussion of the relation between appli-

cation andco-application conditions for termsand existence,

identity, and persistence conditions for objects, see OrdinaryObjects, pp. 5559.11. Sortal terms may (as I have argued elsewhere [Ordi-

nary Objects, pp. 4142]) be arranged in hierarchies, group-ing them into different categories that all share the sameidentityconditions (andwhere the application conditions forthe category are guaranteed to be fulfilled provided thoseof any of the sortals of that category are)so, for exam-ple, terms such as rat, kangaroo, and fish may all be ofthe category animal, and terms like cup, typewriter, andhouse may all be of the category concrete artifact. Sortalsthat come with mutually incompatible identity conditions(as, for example, place, person, and explosion do) can-not refer to things of the same category.

12. Another interesting consequence of this kind of viewis that ontological questions about the existence, identity,




and persistence conditions of a painting, symphony, mu-sical performance, or work of literature have determinateanswers only to the extent that those answers are tacitlydetermined by competent speakers normative practices ofapplying and refusing them in various situations. Where nodefinitive answers are built into our (often vague) practices,theremay simplybe no answer to questions about, for exam-ple, exactly how many words may be changed while a novelsurvives or how much the paint color may deteriorate whilethe same painting remains. We should neither be embar-rassed by the lack of definitive answers to these questionsnor bullied intoproviding arbitraryanswers; where our prac-tices are not determinate we should not expect determinateanswers (compare my The Ontology of Art and Knowl-edge in Aesthetics, pp. 227228, and my Answerable andUnanswerable Questions, in Metametaphysics, ed. DavidJ. Chalmers, Ryan Wasserman, and David Manley [OxfordUniversity Press, 2009], pp. 448452).

13. Davies, Art as Performance, p. 76. Among ontolog-ical pluralists are Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects),Nelson Goodman (Languages of Art), Sherri Irvin (TheOntological Diversity of Artworks), and myself (The On-tology of Art).

14. This does not, however, rule out the idea that theremay be some constraints on identity and persistence con-ditions common to all works of art, even if these are notsufficient to specify a category and, with it, a single set ofidentity and persistence conditions shared by all works ofart. I discuss one such possible constraintpreservation ofaesthetic propertiesbelow.

15. And the way to determine what ontological kinds ofworks of art there are in a given society must go at least inpart by wayof understanding theconceptual system embod-iedin thepractices of the local peoplein naming, preserving,and otherwise dealing with their art. (If a tribe treats certainbodily movements as constituting a chiap only in a cere-monial context, then they cannot turn out to be mistakenabout the survival conditions for a chiap, and showing themthat the same motions can be made anywhere at any timewill not be counter-evidence.)

16. See my Realism and Human Kinds, Philosophyand Phenomenological Research67 (2003): 580609, at pp.592593. Issues about readymades may be addressedby con-sidering selection a kind of degenerate creation. I will leavefurther discussion of these cases to one side here.

17. Noting that this may not be the same as the objectthe artistintended tocreate.

18. Jerrold Levinson has made the similar point that anartists intentions at least determine what category her workbelongs to. See his Intention and Interpretation: A LastLook, in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger(Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 232233.

19. Of course this does not preclude the idea that wemay exapt natural objects or objects intended as thingsof other kinds, treat them as constituting works of art, andname these works. In this case, the exapter grounds thereference of the term for the work. I will mostly ignore thiscomplication in what follows.

20. http://www.thomson-craighead.net/docs/thap.htm21. See Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online

Clash of Culture and Commerce (London: Tate, 2003),p. 147.

22. http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/

23. A similar program-based work is Len BaldwinsGoodWorld, which progressively abstracts from a conven-tional site so that [w]hat you see is a real-time phantomrepresentation of the original sketched in magenta squares.Most, if not all, of the remaining images on the page are

turned into yellow wrappers and the text and links aretransformed into *_* symbolizing a complacent happyface (http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?5635).

24. http://www.teleportacia.org/war/25. Stallabrass, Internet Art, pp. 3641. The link is

http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/100cc/hqx/i900.html26. Stallabrass, Internet Art, pp. 2729. The link is

http://www.easylife.org/award/27. http://www.rhizome.org/artbase/policy.htm28. http://www.rhizome.org/artbase/policy.htm29. This, of course, is not to deny that there may be an

identifiable art form such as computer art (as DominicLopes argues inA Philosophy of Computer Art[New York:Routledge, 2009]) that may include some or most works ofInternet art. If we unify art forms in terms of shared ap-preciative features (for example, Lopes argues that havinginteractivity as relevant to its appreciation is what unifiesworks of computer art), then there may be ontological di-versity (in terms of identity, individuation, and persistenceconditions) even within a single artform.

30. Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contemporary Art,p. 315.

31. Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contemporary Art,pp. 315316.

32. Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contemporary Art,p. 319.

33. Compare Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contem-porary Art, p. 319. As Irvin nicely points out in anotherarticle (Museums and the Shaping of Contemporary Art-works, Museum Management and Curatorship 21 [2006]:143156), museums and other art institutions (presumablylike Rhizome, though she does not use this example) maythus also play an indirect role in establishing the ontologicalstatus of certain works, by asking artists for various sortsof clarification, by providing rubrics (like the artists intentform) that give them a range of options for sanctioning dif-ferent ways of preserving their work, and so on, all of whichmay provoke an artist to produce a sanctionor a kind ofsanctionthat would otherwise be absent.

34. See my Answerable and Unanswerable Questions.There may also be limits, for example, consistency con-straints, on what sorts of conditions an artist may impose.For discussion of related problems of inconsistent ontologi-cal conceptions, see my The Easy Approach to Ontology,

Axiomathes19 (2009): 115.35. Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contemporary Art,

p. 321.36. Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contemporary Art,

p. 321.37. See my The Ontology of Art and The Ontology

of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics.38. Thanks to David Davies for raising this type of issue

in his comments on an earlier version of this article.39. Davies,Art as Performance, pp. 108112.40. Similarly, while gift is not a category-specifying

term, some necessary identity conditions may be commonto all token giftsfor example, that it be given by the sameperson or persons on the same occasion.




41. These seem to present cases in which the role of anartists intent in specifying the category and boundaries ofa work may also make it indirectly relevant to the worksinterpretation (compare Levinsons Intention and Inter-pretation: A Last Look).

42. Stallabrass,Internet Art, p. 42.43. Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contemporary Art,

p. 320.44. Compare Irvins The Artists Sanction in Contem-

porary Art, p. 320.45. This may bring the above understanding of what de-

termines the ontological status of the work of art into closercontact with David Daviess view that what matters. . .forthe individuation of . . .artworks in general, is the set ofproperties normative for their proper appreciation (ThePrimacy of Practice in the Ontology of Art,The Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism67 [2009]: 159172, at p. 170).Yet I would add two caveats: first, that we must recognizethat humanbeliefs andpractices, at bottom, fixwhat proper-ties are normative for the works appreciation and, second,that the features normative for appreciation are only onefactor (although a particularly important one) in determin-ing the ontological status of a work; other practices alsocome into play, including those involved in exhibition, buy-

ing and selling, restoration, and so on. The idea that suchnormative features are partly constitutive of what it is tobe a work of art of a given kind is in line with Heideggersobservations that part of what it is, for example, to be aready-to-hand object (such as an artifact) is for it to havecertain normative features, for example, that it is to be usedin certain ways. The fact thatontological, modal, and norma-tive features come together in this way is, I think, one thatmay be made especially evident in considering the ontol-ogy ofart, but which may also have interesting ramificationsthrough other areas of metaphysics. But I will have to leavediscussion of that for elsewhere.

46. Compare Irvin, The Artists Sanction in Contempo-rary Art, p. 320.

47. Although background practices for entities of otherkinds (like computer games or programs) may also con-tribute to the ontological disambiguation, so that pure stip-ulation of the identity and persistence conditions for thework to be referred to is seldom required.

48. Many thanks to an anonymous referee for this jour-nal, David Davies, Sherri Irvin, Katherine Thomson-Jones,Martin Thomson-Jones, and to Lindsey Fiorelli and the restof theaudience at Oberlin College(where thiswas presentedin February 2009) for helpful comments or discussion.

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