ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on issues that arise when considering artworks themselves. It also focuses on aesthetic and conceptual issues about artworks rather than on the artist's or audience's perspectives. The chapter considers the artist and the audience and zero in on aspects of artworks themselves. It looks at issues related to artworks, under the assumption that indeed have artworks. The fact of the possibility of forgery points to differences among artworks: that is, by their very nature, some artworks, but only some, have hecceity. In the reading below, Joseph Margolis discusses what he calls the "ontological peculiarity" of artworks. Margolis says that artworks are tokens, but they are a unique kind of token. The point, of course, is that formalists claim that context might be informative or useful in understanding or cognitively appreciating or perhaps even emotionally responding to an artwork, but context is not basic or fundamental in what makes artworks art.
