Variants of Concern: Authenticity, Conservation, and the Type-Token Distinction

ABSTRACT

Over the last 20 years, the conservation literature around installation and performance artworks has increasingly relied on concepts and analogies from the philosophy of music to reformulate the concept of authenticity for artworks that recur in multiple instances. Within these frameworks, authenticity is often framed as a quality ascribed to a manifestation on the basis of its compliance with the artist’s explicit directives or a precision of formal resemblance with past manifestations. This article resituates the concept of authenticity invoked in fine art conservation within a wider discourse in analytic philosophy on the type-token distinction and artworks as abstract entities that are instantiated in time and space. Given the intersubjective nature and situatedness of authenticity judgements pertaining to a work’s manifestations, this article considers the limitations of authenticity frameworks predicated exclusively on score compliance and considers how a type-token ontology is more capacious. This article demonstrates how this distinction already underpins existing frameworks and discourses, how it aids in conceptualising the relationship between an artwork’s potentially multiple versions or variants and their manifestations, and how it accommodates the ways perceptions of an artwork’s identity are socially mediated through time and may differ across its viewership.

KEYWORDS:

• Authenticity
• identity
• instantiation
• significant properties
• abstract objects
• contemporary art
• time-based media

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to both of my thesis supervisors – Dominic Paterson and Erma Hermens – for their guidance, and to Hélia Marçal, Rebecca Gordon, Renée van de Vall, Zoë Miller, and my anonymous peer reviewer, who each provided invaluable feedback on various drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Score compliance’ with respect to the authenticity of contemporary artworks is discussed explicitly by van de Vall (2015), although the term originates in Languages of Art (Goodman 1968, 117; 186–187) and is not common in the conservation literature.

2 Goodman’s distinctions are diagnoses of conventions specific to European artistic traditions, which have been propagated by Western cultural hegemony. Goodman (1984, 140) noted, however, that such distinctions stem from ‘a tradition that might have been different and may change’.

3 Levinson (1980, 21) differentiates between what he terms implicit types and initiated types, the former being abstract entities where ‘their existence is implicitly granted when a general framework of possibilities is given’ and the latter being those entities that ‘begin to exist only when they are initiated by an intentional human act of some kind’. The explicit and implicit subtypes I refer to here would all fall under Levinson’s category of initiated types.

4 Writing about Tate’s role in stewarding this work, Laurenson and van Saaze (2014, 37) note that ‘Once this practice ceases it will be necessary to work with the artist to re-define it for a different social and historical context’.

Additional information

Funding

This research received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 642892.