Fortalecer los mecanismos y los instrumentos para optimizar el uso de recursos

So far we have found out some important characteristics of singular artworks. Amongst other things, the singular/multiple-distinction is obviously not as straightforward as it might seem. Painting, for instance, could be a multiple art form if the required technology was available. Furthermore, not every multiple artwork is notational. Photography and printmaking seem to disprove that notationality is a necessary condition for multiplicity. Whether it is a sufficient condition has been called into question by Goodman with his example of the Martian library.

So there is a web of phenomena that have to be distinguished and explained in more detail. There are – or can be – singular artworks; hitherto singular artworks that might as well be multiple, like paintings; multiple artworks that are notational like music or literature; multiple artworks that are not notational like printmaking; and multiple artworks that might as well be singular, like Martian literature. The aim of this section is to clarify how to make sense of

these possibilities by going through several example cases, some of them real and some imaginary. The overall aim of the investigation is to answer the question: what makes an artwork singular or multiple? The view that I will present here is that being singular or multiple is a matter of an artwork’s production process. Once this theory has been explained and made plausible, the picture of the singular/multiple distinction will be rounded out.

The overall thesis that I would like to put forward and defend can be summarised with the slogan “production determines category”. Whether an artwork is singular or multiple depends on the artist’s intentions. They have to be seen in the broader context of prevailing artistic practices and conventions, because an artist is influenced by them, but ultimately it is because of the artists’ intentions that the Mona Lisa is singular and Ulysses multiple. The argument against the claim that there are no singular artworks that is derived from this view is: whoever thinks that the Mona Lisa is multiple does not understand the work. It was not Leonardo’s intention that this painting should be a multiple work of art.252

In Chapter 3 I said that the context of its production is relevant to an artwork’s identity. I also remarked that a view in the theory of interpretation compatible with this is that in order to be able to fully understand and appreciate an artwork, one has to know about the context of its making. Theories about the role of context in ontology and in interpretation might mutually support each other. If the – very generally speaking – contextualist stance towards ontology and meaning is correct, context might also be relevant concerning which category an artwork belongs to. This is just to point out that what I am saying about artists’ intentions determining ontological categories

can be seen as part of a larger programme that one might pursue, namely a theory of art that puts heavy emphasis on the importance of context in many respects.

To go back to the example of the Mona Lisa: surely it was not Leonardo’s intention that his painting should be instantiated multiple times – that thought probably never even occurred to him. He wanted the Mona Lisa to be a singular work of art. If (at least certain) intentions of an artist fix the meaning of a work, then part of the meaning of the Mona Lisa is that it is supposed to be a singular work of art. So if someone says that the Mona Lisa is a multiple work of art, he or she is simply wrong. The Mona Lisa was not intended to be multiple, thus it is not multiple.

Reicher briefly hints at this view, though she does not follow the thought any further:

The difference between composers and painters might be that composers think of their work being realised by other persons (that is why they produce notations), whereas painters realise their works themselves and usually do not attach importance to further realisations by others – on the contrary.253

Composers and writers intend their works to be realised multiple times, to be performed, printed, and read out. The more often his novel is printed and sold, the happier a writer will be. Painters, on the other hand, want their work to be unique and do not want every copy of it to count as an instance.

This is what determines whether a given work is singular or multiple. The artist’s intention decides the issue, and in most cases paintings and carved sculptures are intended to be singular, and literature and music are intended to be multiple artworks. As I said, a broader context of prevailing artistic practices and conventions is likely to play a role here. Tom’s intention that his

painting is a singular artwork is influenced by or born out of the fact that paintings are also commonly regarded as being singular, understood as being singular, and treated as being singular. Tom’s intention surely cannot be simply separated from artistic traditions, from long established practices and theories. Even if he deliberately declares his painting to be multiple, and any copy of it shall be a realisation of it, this intention might be a reaction towards ways of treating paintings that are too conservative for Tom’s taste. However, the point is merely that the artist’s intentions are embedded in a wider artistic context.

That the intentions behind the production of a given artwork should determine whether it is singular or multiple is also to say that being singular and being multiple are not natural properties. Though certain art forms standardly count as singular and others as multiple, this is due to artistic traditions that might have been different and might also change in the future. An artwork is a cultural artefact. The answer to the question of whether it is singular or multiple is not to be sought from a physicist or chemist. They could tell us about the nature of rocks and liquids, but artworks are not natural kinds, but cultural kinds, and singularity and multiplicity are properties an artwork possesses merely due to what the artist who created it wanted it to be. The nature of the artwork is up to its designer.

Goodman suspects that “initially, perhaps, all arts are autographic. Where the works are transitory, as in singing and reciting, or require many persons for their production, as in architecture and symphonic music, a notation may be devised in order to transcend the limitation of time and the individual.”254 The development of notations as means to realise a work multiple times thus happened because people wanted to preserve and pass on artworks, or several

people were needed for its realisation. Poetry might initially have been singular, because poets intended their works to be singular – maybe just because that was the way poetry was treated. A poem was recited once, and this singular event constituted the work. Then the desire to recite the same artwork more than once, to spread it and make it available to more people, led to a new intention: that the work should be recited multiple times and not only by the poet, but also by other people. Empirically, this might be wrong, but this is just supposed to be an illustration of the production-based categorisation theory. The same transition from singular to multiple might happen to painting, I said in the previous chapter – a development promoted, for instance, by the development of the Supercopy Machine. This is not to say that painting could become multiple merely because of the existence of the perfect reproduction techniques the supercopy machine provides. The supercopy machine would be the means to multiplicity, but does not necessitate it. What cannot happen is that painting in general becomes a multiple art form. The possibility of perfect copies does not mean that paintings are no longer singular artworks. This misses the point made earlier. Who claims that the Mona Lisa is singular has not understood the work, since it was not the intention of the artist that the painting should be multiple. Even though the supercopy machine would make painting notational, this does not change the fact that painting – at least up to the invention of the supercopy machine – was commonly intended to be singular. A notational art form can still be singular, given the corresponding intentions of the artist. Goodman has made this point with his example of the Martian library. On Mars, there is only one exemplar of each novel, and literature is treated as a singular art form. But have I not also said earlier on that it cannot be decisive for whether a work is singular or multiple how many

exemplars there are? After all, there could be only the manuscript of a novel and no further exemplar, but that would not make the novel a singular artwork. However, it is not the fact that there is only one exemplar of the latest novel by a Martian writer that makes it singular. What makes it singular is that writer’s intention. Again, this might have to do with broader cultural practices on Mars. The writer probably intended his novel to be singular because that is just the way literature has been treated on Mars for thousands of years. At the same time, had he intended his novel to be multiple, to be printed as often as possible, to be spread out, and any copy (that fulfils the correct identity conditions) is to count as an instance of his work, it would have been multiple. The Martians might nevertheless only have printed one exemplar and put it in their museum. But in that case they missed the artist’s intentions. They did not understand that this is not how the artist wanted his work to be treated. The Martians are wrong in thinking that it is a singular artwork.

There are three possible consequences of the invention of the supercopy machine:

a) The new, “post supercopy machine”, paintings are multiple, and the old “pre supercopy machine” paintings remain singular. The old paintings, given that they were intended to be singular, would remain singular anyway. But it could become common that paintings are intended to be multiple. The originals might still enjoy the special interest of aficionados, just like original manuscripts and scores do. But anything that complies with the notation of painting x and refers to x is a token of that type. It is perfectly conceivable that it could become the standard intention of painters that their works are multiple. This kind of development might

take some time, but it is possible that just like we now regard paintings as singular, we will regard them as multiple at some point in the future. b) It could be that some of the new paintings are multiple, and others are

singular. While the old paintings remain singular, future painters do not have uniform intentions as to how their paintings are to be treated. Some of them produce singular artworks, others multiple artworks. Say that Tom is not only a talented painter, but also an obsessive gambler. Furthermore, he is a very unfortunate gambler, and so he is broke. On a weekend in Las Vegas, he desperately wants to gamble and makes the following deal with a local loan-shark: Tom will get $10 000 from him, and in return the loan-shark will get whatever the profit from Tom’s next painting will be. One week later, Tom is working on his new painting and intends it to be a multiple artwork. The painting is a huge success, and for years Toms earns royalties from it. All these earnings belong to the loan- shark, though, and Tom is increasingly annoyed with himself and thinks that he should have intended this painting to be singular. Then he would just have sold it once, probably for much less than he has been earning through the multiple instances, and the loan-shark would not have made that much money out of Tom.

c) A third possible scenario is that following the establishment of supercopy machines, all paintings stay singular. The old paintings are singular anyway, and the new ones will be singular as well. Despite having the appropriate technology, future painters do not intend their paintings to be multiple. There will be no change in the way paintings are treated. Copies of paintings – even supercopies – are still just copies and not instances, and paintings can still be forged referentially. That is also to say again

that notationality is not only not necessary – at least not in all cases – but also not sufficient for multiplicity.

What would be the consequences of the supercopy machine for forgeries anyway? Under conditions a) paintings could not be forged anymore, just like works of literature. A “forgery” of a painting would just be an instance of the painting. Accordingly, b) entails that only the old paintings can still be forged, not the new ones, and c) entails that only some of the new ones can be forged. Obviously, if d) were to happen, all paintings could still be forged. In scenarios where there can be forgeries of paintings, the invention of the supercopy machine means that forging has become much easier, though.

What if an artist’s intentions and the common cultural practices contradict each other? I have briefly pointed as such a constellation, i.e. the Martian writer who intends his novel to be multiple, but it is treated as if it was singular. Or, to make up another example, say Tom proclaims that his latest painting is a multiple work of art, and anything that corresponds 1:1 with its pictorial properties is supposed to be an exemplar of the work. But the artworld does not comply. The original is sold for 10 000 Euros, but copies of it are sold for 10 Euros. No one owning a copy of it thinks that he owns an exemplar of Tom’s work. Does that still mean that the painting is multiple? Or has Tom’s intention failed in this case?

By now somebody who is not happy with the idea that intentions should determine to which category a work belongs to will object. If intentions and cultural practices are in conflict, is it not very unconvincing to keep insisting that intentions decide whether a work is singular or multiple, even though they contradict all established practices? If Jane declares that her novel is singular,

is it not still multiple? One might refer to Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art” for an alternative conception of the production context determining categories. The “categories” Walton is concerned with in his paper are genres – what decides which art form a work belongs to? Walton gives four criteria that determine “in which categories a work is correctly perceived”.255 _{One might be} tempted to take Walton’s criteria and apply them not only to the question of which genre an artwork belongs to, but also to the ontological question. Maybe it would be more plausible to say that Walton’s criteria govern the singular/multiple distinction instead of artist’s intentions. I will briefly go through the four criteria and then argue for a compromise between both the four criteria conception and the intention conception.

The first criterion is whether the work in question, W, has many standard features of a category, C. Walton writes that “[a] feature of a work is standard

with respect to a (perceptually distinguishable) category just in case it is among those in virtue of which works in that category belong to that category.”256 _For instance, standard features of paintings are that they are painted; on a flat surface; on one side; standard features of novels are that they are composed of words; that there is a plot; and so on.

The second criterion is “the fact, if it is one, that W is better, or more interesting or pleasing aesthetically, or more worth experiencing when perceived in C rather than it is when perceived in alternative ways.”257

The third criterion is whether W was intended to be perceived as belonging to

C by the artist. So Walton does not overlook intentions, but thinks that they are only one of four criteria and are not decisive on their own. That intentions

255 _{Walton, Kendall: “Categories of Art”. In: The Philosophical Review 79 (1970), pp. 334-367:}

357.

256 _{Walton: “Categories of Art”, p. 339.} 257 _{Walton: “Categories of Art”, p. 357.}

alone cannot always decide which genre a work belongs to is immediately convincing. If Tom sculpts a statue and says that this is a painting; or if he writes a novel he claims to be science fiction, but it takes place in ancient Rome, they are not a statue and not a science fiction novel, despite Tom’s intentions. His intentions have failed and are overridden by the other criteria deciding over C. Whether the idea that intentions determine singularity and multiplicity can be as easily dismissed remains to be seen, though.

Finally, it matters whether W would be treated as belonging to C. “The categories in which a work is perceived, according to this condition, are generally the ones in which the artist’s contemporaries did perceive or would have perceived it.”258

Would the Walton account of categories be useful when applied to the singular/multiple distinction? That would mean that whether W is singular depends not only on the artist’s intentions, but also on whether W shares standard features of singular works or whether it has contra-standard features (like being notational); whether it is more rewarding to experience W as a singular work; and whether W would generally be perceived as singular.

Regardless of which theory seems preferable, the slogan “production determines category” still captures the general idea promoted here to explain what makes a work singular or multiple. The question is just how to understand “production” – as the artist’s intentions or as governed by the four criteria.