Art and Authority: Moral Rights and Meaning in Contemporary Visual Art
K. E. Gover
Abstract
Art and Authority is a philosophical essay on artistic authority and freedom: its sources, nature, and limits. It draws upon real-world cases and controversies in contemporary visual art and connects them to significant theories in the philosophical literature on art and aesthetics. Artworks, it is widely agreed, are the products of intentional human activity. And yet they are different from other kinds of artifacts; for one thing, they are meaningful. It is often presumed that artworks are an extension of their makers’ personality in ways that other kinds of artifacts are not. This is clear f ... More
Art and Authority is a philosophical essay on artistic authority and freedom: its sources, nature, and limits. It draws upon real-world cases and controversies in contemporary visual art and connects them to significant theories in the philosophical literature on art and aesthetics. Artworks, it is widely agreed, are the products of intentional human activity. And yet they are different from other kinds of artifacts; for one thing, they are meaningful. It is often presumed that artworks are an extension of their makers’ personality in ways that other kinds of artifacts are not. This is clear from our recognition that an artist continues to own his or her creation even once the art object, in which the artwork inheres, belongs to another. But it is far from clear how or why artists acquire this authority, and whether it originates from a special, intimate bond between artist and artwork. In response to these questions, the book argues for a ‘dual-intention theory’ of artistic authorship, in which it is claimed that authorship entails two orders of intention. The first, ‘generative’ moment, names the intentions that lead to the production of an artwork. The second, ‘evaluative’ moment, names the decision in which the artist decides whether or not to accept the artwork as part of their corpus.
Keywords:
philosophy of art,
moral rights,
authorship,
contemporary visual art,
artistic freedom,
aesthetics,
artist
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198768692 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: February 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198768692.001.0001 |
