Abstract
I propose a minimal account of authorship that specifies the fundamental nature of the author-relation and its minimal domain composition in terms of a three-place causal-intentional relation holding between agents and sort-relative works. I contrast my account with the minimal account tacitly held by most authorship theories, which is a two-place relation holding between agents and works simpliciter. I claim that only my view can ground productive and informative principled distinctions between collective production and collective authorship.
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Notes
Likewise ‘author’ may best be viewed as a sort-relative predicate. Kit Fine (2003) argues the same for the predicate ‘make’.
One could make a case for Hilpinen (1993) arguing for a three-place relation (agents, intentional products (artifacts), sortal descriptions), but his account is best read as a two-place relation (agents, artifacts) for which sortal descriptions broadly construed hold for objects qua artifacts only if the sortal descriptions are mentally represented in the agent’s directing intentions (I address this later). Hilpinen’s view fundamentally is an account of intentional production (which so construed I would in the main happily endorse) and not an account of authorship.
Though I assume work-descriptions as sortals do so figure.
I am not assuming that work-descriptions must have essentialist accounts; I merely employ one for the sake of simplicity. My view should perform equally well for more pluralist or open-ended accounts, just note that work-descriptions with nebulous satisfaction conditions unsurprisingly ought to result in equally nebulous satisfaction conditions for authorship.
I do not target trivially essential/necessary features (i.e., being an object, being a non-minotaur, being [a painting or a marmoset]).
I use the term ‘substantively’ to mean at least non-trivially and non-accidentally and at most exhaustively or essentially.
For example, consider the painting United States: Most Wanted (1994). There are seemingly only two candidates for authorship of the painting, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. Both Komar and Melamid claim, however, that neither authors the painting; instead, they claim that there is but one author of Most Wanted, which is [Komar and Melamid], the artist team made up of Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid—the team, not its members taken alone, is the source of the substantively figuring intentions. I want to allow at least in principle for such claims to be true.
For my purposes, I do not count as collectively-produced works produced by a single intentional source where that source is some group or collective agent (collective intentions).
Consider also Tobias Wong’s Warhol Gift Wrap (2002)—for around $20,000 Tobias Wong will wrap your holiday gifts using original Warhol screenprints.
Both of course could be used as bottle racks in virtue of having bottle racks as a proper parts.
While master printmakers themselves may also be print artists (e.g., Robert Blackburn) or be sought for collaborative reasons (which I discuss next), I am currently concerned only with cases in which they are commissioned for their printmaking ability alone.
In a telling statement, master printer Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press had this to say about working with Close on the demanding and often thought impossible to produce Keith/Mezzotint (1972)—Close’s first print as a professional artist. “Chuck had specific reasons for doing the mezzotint that were of a particular time and place. All of our successes came out of trying to satisfy his needs” (Sultan 2003, p. 52).
Notice that none of this requires invoking creative/non-creative distinctions (e.g., only Close can be an author because only Close’s intentions are creative intentions). While one may choose to connect creativity with authorship (e.g., Gaut and Livingston 2003), minimal authorship needn’t require it.
LeWitt’s wall drawings were intended to be multiple and were often physically drawn not by Lewitt but by his assistants, gallery staff, or even untrained volunteers off the street.
I do not claim (pace Hilpinen 1993) that all work-descriptions (let alone all author-relevant work-descriptions) are such that A’s intentions substantively figure for w being an F only if A’s intentions mentally represent F.
For example, Frankie Laine was commissioned to sing the theme song for the Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles (1974), but no one told him that the movie was a comedy rather than a serious western, and so his performance was achingly earnest, which only added to the film’s comedic value.
Note that Hilpinen (1993) cannot make this distinction since he claims the author-relation is a bring-into-existence relation, leading him to conflate collective production with collective authorship, and therefore only able to make a distinction between different kinds of authors (e.g., primary authors—those with intentions mentally representing F—and secondary authors—those merely involved in the production of w as an F). This clearly is far too broad.
This can inform the following putatively problematic cases: (i) posthumous authoring (e.g., B completing the late A’s unfinished novel), (ii) the role of editors (Inge 2001; Stillinger 1991), and (iii) withdrawn or disowned authorship (e.g., Alan Smithee/Cordwainer Bird cases). Also, in certain disowning cases, we might regard the collectively-produced work in question as still collectively authored but characterize the collective authorship as non-collaborative, indicating that the intention-directed activities of the authors are independent from or contrary to one another.
I suppose that art and authorship (author and artist, work and artwork) may be intimately connected, and so I suppose that any theory of authorship at least ought to be consistent with there being such a connection. If art is an author-relevant work-description and artists merely authors of works as art, then authorship concerns for artworks appear captive to the myriad disputes about the nature of art. Minimal authorship, however, needn’t be hostage to the peculiarities of art theory. If being art is not a work-description (e.g., adjectival rather than sortal), then artist and author can in principle come apart, and my view at least allows for there to be such a separation. To do otherwise is either to illicitly build into minimal authorship some otherwise peripheral authorship claim or to explicitly or implicitly claim that art theory ought to inform minimal authorship itself. Neither are palatable options, and so accounts of authorship largely motivated by art-theoretic concerns should be to that extent found prima facie suspect.
Producers constrain directors (e.g., The Godfather has a 3-h runtime because supposedly producer Robert Evans, after seeing Coppola’s first cut, told him to make it an hour longer to give it a more “epic” feel). Films may radically depart from the written source material (e.g., The Shining, the film directed by Stanley Kubrick and The Shining, the novel written by Stephen King). A final studio edit may be radically different than what the director and others had envisioned (e.g., Brazil (1985) directed by Terry Gilliam was drastically re-edited by Universal studio executives from a 142-min film with a dark ending to a 94-min film with a happy ending).
In fact, theories precluding work-description relative authorship ipso facto undercut, rather than reinforce, our commonsense intuitions. We also needn’t resort to pluralism for the author concept (e.g., standard authorship, non-standard authorship, authorship*).
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Acknowledgements
The core idea of this paper came from lengthy conversations about authorship I had with Aaron Meskin, Roy T. Cook, and Marcus Rossberg, and as such, I owe a special thanks to these three. I must also thank Robert Stecker for his helpful suggestions on earlier drafts.
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Mag Uidhir, C. Minimal authorship (of sorts). Philos Stud 154, 373–387 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9525-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9525-0