The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks

Abstract

Virtually everyone who has advanced an ontology of art has accepted a constraint to the effect that claims about ontology should cohere with the sort of appreciative claims made about artworks within a mature and reflective version of critical practice. In this chapter, I argue that such a constraint, which I agree is appropriate, rules out a one-size-fits-all ontology of contemporary visual art (and thus of visual art in general). Mature critical practice with respect to contemporary art accords artists a significant degree of stipulative authority regarding the features and boundaries of their works. As I will show, this results in ontological variation among visual artworks. Any claim to the effect that all works belong to the same ontological category will thus come out false or uninformative. Interesting, substantive claims about ontological status can be made only in relation to specific works; that is, we must consider the ontological status of each contemporary artwork individually. The only general ontological claim that can be made about visual artworks (and also about artworks in other forms) is that they belong to the sort of thing that artists create. But this is not a substantive ontological claim. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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