Appropriation and authorship in contemporary art

British Journal of Aesthetics

Volumn 45, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 123-137

  Irvin, Sherri ^a  

^a CARLETON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249428904     PISSN: 00070904     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/aesthj/ayi015     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author", trans. Stephen Heath, in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 148
2. Michel Foucault, 'What Is an Author?', trans. Josué V. Harari, in Paul Rainbow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 101-120
3. Foucault, 'What Is an Author?', p. 120. The passage alludes to a line from Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing
4. Elaine Sturtevant as quoted by Dan Cameron in 'A Conversation', Flash Art, no. 143 (1988), p. 76
5. See Bill Arning's interview with Elaine Sturtevant, 'Sturtevant', Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 2 (1989), p. 43
6. Ernst Gombrich, 'Introduction: On Art and Artists', in The Story of Art, 16th edn (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 32
7. Actual intentionalists hold that the meaning of a work is determined by the artist's intention. See, for example, E. D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale U.P., 1967)
8. and The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)
9. Hypothetical intentionalists hold that the meaning of the work is determined by the intentions a competent interpreter would attribute to the artist, based on the available information. See especially Alexander Nehamas, 'The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal', Critical Inquiry, vol. 8 (1981), pp. 133-149
10. and 'Writer, Text, Work, Author', in Anthony J. Cascardi (ed.), Literature and the Question of Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1989), pp. 267-291
11. as well as Jerrold Levinson, 'Intention and Interpretation in Literauire', in The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essay's (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 1996), pp. 175-213
12. See, for instance, Jeanne Siegel, 'After Sherrie Levine', Arts Magazine, vol. 59 (1985). pp. 141-144
13. Paul Taylor, 'Sherrie Levine Plays with Paul Taylor', Flash Art, no. 135 (1987), pp. 55-59
14. Constance Lewallen, 'Sherrie Levine', Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 6 (1993), pp. 59-83
15. and Martha Buskirk, "Sherrie Levine', October, no. 70 (1994). pp. 98-103
16. As Nelson Goodman has argued, the visual indistinguishability of two works need not be thought to imply that there are no significant aesthetic differences between them. See Languages of Art, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976)
17. Denis Dutton argues that forgeries harm precisely by misrepresenting the forger's level of achievement, and thereby prompting inflated estimations of their worth. See 'Artistic Crimes: The Problem of Forgery in the Arts', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 19 (1979), pp. 302-324
18. Reprinted in slightly modified form as 'Artistic Crimes' in Denis Dutton (ed.), The Forger's Art: Forger and the Philosophy of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 172-187
19. The van Meegeren case is probably the most discussed in philosophical accounts of forgery. Van Meegeren created works that were considered by some art historians to be among Vermeer's greatest masterpieces. For a detailed account, see Hope B. Werness, 'Han van Meegeren fecit', in Dutton (ed.), Hie Forger's Art, pp. 1-57
20. David Goldblatt, 'Self-plagiarism', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 43 (1984), pp. 71-77
21. Alfred Lessing, 'What Is Wrong with a Forgery?', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 23 (1965), pp. 461-471
22. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, i960), pp. 359-360
23. John Hoaglund holds that certain kinds of originality contribute to aesthetic value. See "Originality and Aesthetic Value', British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 16 (1976), pp. 46-55
24. Bruce Vermazen denies this claim in 'The Aesthetic Value of Originality', Midwest Studies in Piriiosopliy, vol. XVI (1901), pp. 266-279
25. Gerald Marzorati, 'Art in the (Re)making', ARTnews, vol. 85 (1986), p. 97
26. In Jerrold Levinson's terms, this would be a categorial intention, which 'govern[s] not what a work is to mean but how it is to be fundamentally conceived or approached. The most general of categorial intentions of concern here would be the intention that something be regarded as literature (or as art) at all, which obviously enjoins certain modes of approach as opposed to others.' See Levinson, 'Intention and Interpretation in Literature', p. 188
27. Below, I discuss the possible case of a forger who does, in fact, intend his products to be artworks
28. Failure to satisfy the objective, however, will not rule her out as a forger; bad forgers are still forgers
29. In a statement to accompany a 1982 exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Levine said, 'We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash ... We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.' The statement closes with an allusion to Barthes's notion of the death of the author: "The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.' See 'Statement', reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds). Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 1067
30. Some critics adopted a similar stance in relation to her work; for instance, Stuart Morgan suggests that the self of the artist is eliminated in appropriation works, and that the works themselves are presented as unauthored objects. See Morgan, 'Ceci est un Warhol; Ceci n'est pas un Warhol', Beaux Arts Magazine, no. 92 (1991), p. 61. Levine eventually expressed regret that she had 'collaborated in' such readings of her work. See Marzorati, 'Art in the (Re)making', p. 92
31. Of course, it will be possible to offer minimal interpretations of the representational content of the forger's products, just as we interpret road signs. But this is not interpretation in the sense that interests us here. See Arthur Danto's related distinction in 'Interpretation and Identification', The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1981), pp. 115-135, especially p. 135
32. and in 'Works of Art and Mere Representations', also in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, pp. 136-164