Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performances as artworks 141
Furthermore, in listening to an improvised performance in this way, we
disregard things that might concern us in listening to a performance of a
performable work. Alperson quotes Francis Sparshott to this effect:
When the musician improvises, we make allowances for fluffs, interruptions,
squawks, and all sorts of distracting concomitants that we assume to be no
part of the performance. But we also allow for his forgetting what he was
doing, trying to do two things at once, changing his mind about where he is
going, starting more hares than he can chase at once, picking up where he
thought he had left off but resuming what was not quite there in the first
place, discovering and pursuing tendencies in what he has done that would
have taken a rather different form if he had thought of them at the time, and
so on. (Sparshott 1982, 255)
Do these kinds of considerations show that an improvised performance like
Jarrett’s can be a work of art? Thom thinks not. Responding to Alperson, he
maintains that the qualities we appreciate in good improvisations – “spontaneity,
excitement, and the display of an ability to solve problems and be inventive
without preparation” (Thom 1993, 63), for example – are qualities they possess
as objects of aesthetic beholding, not as artworks. For, he again insists, artworks
must be enduring entities. It seems, then, as if we are back at the same impasse
of conflicting intuitions that led us to look at Alperson’s account in the first
place. Indeed, it might be thought that, if we are trying to establish that
improvised performances in the performing arts can be artworks, the strat-
egy of pointing to the kinds of criteria to which we appeal in evaluating such
performances is an unpromising one. For none of the kinds of criteria that
Alperson cites is exclusive to the evaluation of artworks. The criteria cited for
assessing musical constructions are applicable to constructions in general,
including philosophy papers. And the criteria of “sensitivity, lyricism, and
general virtuosity” applicable to an improviser’s playing of her instrument
would also be appropriate for judging the performance of a lecturer, as long
as we operate with a suitably broad conception of “lyricism.” And any lecturer
who works without a “script” takes the same kind of risk as the improvising
musician. Thus we cannot demonstrate that improvisational performances in
the performing arts are artworks by pointing to the fact that these criteria
are applied to such performances. For they are also applied to many things
that are clearly not works of art.
At this point, I think the right strategy is to question the distinction upon
which Thom is relying in his argument – the distinction between artworks,
as enduring entities, and artistic performances, as transient objects of aes-
thetic beholding. Rather than focus on the criteria used in assessing impro-
vised performances in the arts, we should ask about the kinds of things being