Ontology of Music and Art
Summary
The ontology of music and art investigates the fundamental nature and existence conditions of artistic works, encompassing both musical compositions and visual or performative artefacts. Central concerns include whether works are abstract entities, concrete objects or events, and how they relate to their instances, such as scores, performances or physical canvases. Debates address type-token relations, the role of authenticity and authorship, and the degree to which cultural recognition shapes an artwork’s being. In music, this spans questions of whether a score constitutes the work or if each performance instantiates and thereby embodies the work. In the visual arts, issues of reproducibility, originals versus copies, and the ontology of improvisation arise. These inquiries bear on archival practice, intellectual property, digital humanities and artificial-intelligence systems for creative generation, supporting cataloguing, preservation and cross-cultural understanding of art forms.
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Ontology of Music and Art publication trend
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Technical terms
Ontology: The branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, categories and relations of being or existence.
Artifact: A human-made object or work regarded as possessing its own ontological status, distinct from natural entities.
Type-token distinction: A theoretical distinction whereby a type is an abstract pattern or kind, and a token is a concrete instance of that type.
Platonism (in art): The view that works of art are abstract, non-spatiotemporal entities existing independently of physical instances.
Nominalism (in art): The view that artworks are concrete, created objects whose existence depends on particular instances and human practices.
References
- Every Performance Is a Stage: Musical Stage Theory as a Novel Account for the Ontology of Musical Works. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2018).
- Type Realism Reconsidered. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2023).
- Two Originals, One Artwork: On the Ontology of Originals and Improvisations. Estetika The European Journal of Aesthetics (2022).
- Musical works are mind-independent artifacts. Synthese (2023).
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