performances as artworks 143
broad sense an artifact. On the other hand, to take an interest in something
as an “object of aesthetic contemplation” generally prescinds from its status
as an artifact. Our most obvious models of “objects of aesthetic contempla-
tion” are natural phenomena such as landscapes, mountains, and perhaps fogs
at sea. Once we think of an object of contemplation as something made or
done, our interest becomes interrogative. We seek reasons rather than natural
causes for its being ordered in the way that it is. If we are right in our account
of what is distinctive of our interest in artworks – namely a particular kind of
interrogative interest in the manifold that results from a (usually) completed
action – then it is difficult to see why the non-enduring nature of individual
performances should be relevant to their status as artworks. Indeed, our
encounters with artworks, whereby we are able to engage with them in the
distinctive manner that I have described, are always ephemeral, however last-
ing their effects on us may be. That something that we encounter in this way
may itself be ephemeral, available only on a particular occasion of reception,
may be regrettable, but doesn’t seem to have any real bearing on the artistic
status of that thing. Thus, by a more circuitous but I hope more satisfying
route, we return to Kivy’s original objection to Thom: it isn’t clear why we
should share the intuition that only enduring things can be artworks. While
we could stiputatively restrict the term “artwork” to things that endure, this
stipulation doesn’t seem to be grounded in anything bearing essentially on
the ways in which artworks work.
3 The Artistic Status of Performances Within
the Classical Paradigm
We reflected a few pages ago on the oddness of saying, as one emerges from
hearing a piano recital of Chopin’s nocturnes, that one has just heard two
works of art. Should our willingness to allow that performances falling
outside the classical paradigm, like Jarrett’s Köln Concert , can be artworks
lead us to a similar view of performances of performable works? Can I really
get two works for the price of one when I attend a performance of a perform-
able work? (And, if so, should we conceal this fact from promoters lest they
raise their prices?)
Peter Kivy cites approvingly an argument by Thomas Carson Mark (1981)
that, if accepted, would have the effect of artistically enfranchising per-
formances of performable works. Mark argues that we should think of the
performer of a performable work as like someone who puts a quoted pas-
sage to use as a way of making an utterance of their own. For example,
if Berthold, inviting Magda to accompany him on an evening foray along
the South Bank, addresses her with the words “Let us go then, you and I,