ABSTRACT
Ontology-the study of the nature of being and of beings-is a somewhat esoteric field of inquiry at the best of times, and might seem completely unmotivated when we turn to the kinds of beings that enter into our everyday practices, such as artworks. If asked what kind of thing an artwork is, most people would respond that obviously artworks are the kinds of things you can see hanging on the walls of galleries, or projected on screens in cinemas, or can hear performed in concert halls, or can read in the kind of thing sold in a bookstore. Appreciating an artwork is then a matter of perceptually engaging with it in one of these ways, and artworks are valued because of qualities of the experiences thereby elicited. This view is broadly “empiricist” in holding that artistic appreciation and evaluation require little if any knowledge of features of a work’s history of making not determinable from an inspection of either it (in the case of paintings) or one of its instances (in the case of films, musical works, and literature). In this sense, the experiential engagement required to appreciate an artwork is “unmediated.”
