ABSTRACT
In Ch 3 I considered the ontological question: How do art works exist? Following Currie (1989) and the ATH, all art works are action types (i.e. a performance or enactment achieved by the artist), constituted by both structure and heuristic (i.e. the theoretical and conceptual framework, or process, causally associated with the work’s creation). Not all action types are art works, but all art works (according to Currie’s IMH) are capable of multiple instance, and one can not differentiate between appreciation of original and any ‘correct’ (i.e. causally related) copy. As there may be action types other than artistic action types, what differentiates the artistic type as kind or class? The best criterion of differentiation - the Tovliest explanation’ - is on the basis of the ‘value’ of a given action type. Correctly understood, art works are just those action types judged artistically valuable, and ‘artistic values’ according to the SRH are ‘real’ values. The SRVH augments Currie’s ontology of art as action type,
providing criteria for arriving at a concept of art as artistically valuable action type, which, although definitional in effect, allows for a very wide class of art works indeed. The SRVH holds that there are value facts and truths, therefore we have knowledge of value, including knowledge of artistic value. Budd’s theory of artistic value held it to be: intrinsic, sen tim en t-d ep en d en t, in te rsu b je c tiv e , a n th ro p o cen tric and incommensurable, to which the SRVH, ATH and IMH add: contextual, contingent, non-ethnocentric, multiply instantiated and objective, of a work/action type with both structure and heuristic. Together they constitute what I have called the AVH.
