Art As Performance

• Elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts.
  
• Offers a provocative view about the kinds of things that artworks are and how they are to be understood.
  
• Reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art.
  
• Highlights core topics in aesthetics and art theory, including traditional theories about the nature of art, aesthetic appreciation, artistic intentions, performance, and artistic meaning.

1. Introduction:.

Challenges to Aesthetic Empiricism.

Methodological Interlude: The ‘Pragmatic Constraint’ on the Ontology of Art.

Aesthetic Empiricism and the Philosophy of Art.

2. Aesthetic Empiricism:.

Indirect Arguments Against Aesthetic Empiricism.

3. The Fine Structure of the Focus of Appreciation:.

The Structure of the Focus of Appreciation.

4. The Artwork as Performance: An Argument from Artistic Intentions:.

Overview.

The Bearing of Provenance on Work and Focus.

Artistic Intentions and the Ontology of Art.

Interpretation and Intention.

A Role for Actual Intentions.

Ontological Implications.

Conclusions.

5. Provenance, Modality, and the Identity of the Artwork:.

Preliminaries.

6. Artwork, Action, and Performance.

7. Art as Performance:.

Elaborating the Performance Theory.

Structure and Focus.

Heuristics and the Individuation of Artworks.

Work-Constitution and Modality on the Performance Theory.

Performances, Actions, and Doings.

8. Revisionism and Modernism Revisited.

9. Performance as Art.

10. Defining ‘Art’ as Performance, and the Values of Art:.

Notes Towards a Definition of ‘Art’.

The Values of Art.

Conclusions: The Case Against Contextualism.

References.

Index