22 performance and the classical paradigm
artworks by providing information germane to the appreciation of those
works – for example, a talk given by a curator about a painting in a gallery.
- Throughout this book, I shall for convenience follow the general consensus in
taking an artwork to be the product of the generative activity of the artist(s).
What the artist produces, on this view, is an artistic vehicle that articulates an
artistic content in virtue of those shared understandings we have termed an
artistic medium. In the case of a work like Vermeer’s View of Delft , for exam-
ple, the artwork is the physical canvas understood as possessing certain repre-
sentational, expressive, and formal properties. In adopting for convenience
this view of artworks, I bracket my own view, for which I argued in my 2004,
that artworks are properly identified not with the products of artistic activity,
but with the activity itself as completed by those products. Nothing in this
book, I think, turns on whether I am right in this, with one exception
addressed near the end of Chapter 2.
I should also perhaps note that, while, in my 2004, I characterized the artis-
tic activities that are, on my view, artworks as “performances,” I was not claim-
ing that they are performances in the sense spelled out in this chapter. Artists are
indeed guided by their expectations concerning the evaluative eye or ear of
receivers, but it is the product of their activity, rather than the activity itself, that
they expect to be evaluated in a certain way. See further my clarifications of
what it is to act “for an audience” in section 1 of Chapter 9.