ABSTRACT
Any appreciation-understood as involving things like interpretation and evaluation-of a television artwork makes assumptions about a number of prior issues. Minimally, there are two: First, to appreciate a television artwork is to make some tacit ontological assumptions inasmuch as the work first needs to be identified and individuated from other works. This much is widely accepted among television scholars and philosophers of varying theoretical commitments-including those who engage in interpretation with aims other than appreciation.1 Second, and less acknowledged, is that paradigmatic appreciative activities like interpretation and evaluation also make some implicit assumptions about the relationship (or lack thereof) between the work’s ontological status and artistic intentions. One usually has some underlying rationale or motivation for taking the work’s ontological features to be what one takes them to be, and it usually involves either an acceptance or denial that artistic intentions have a role to play in the determination of those features. As I shall explain in more detail presently, in the former case, the work’s ontological features are often regarded as fixed by the successfully realized intentions of its creators. In the latter case, the work’s ontological features are usually assumed to be constructed by its audience(s).
